


No Kind of Atmosphere

by Zetared



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 14:18:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 41,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4183014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The "Art School AU." </p><p>Arnold Rimmer just wanted to get away from Io, and attending art college on the bog-planet of Earth was about as far from his family's expectations as he could hope to get.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There was a Lump above Arnold’s bunk and, quite frankly, it was starting to get on his nerves. It was _always_ there, a festering, noxious bundle of tatty blankets and stain-covered clothes. The consistent presence of the Lump had caused quite a lot of consternation and even mild concern those first few days of term. After the first week of non-responsiveness, Arnold had almost called for help to make sure the Lump was, in fact, still breathing. Imagine, starting his first term as a master’s level student with a dead roommate. He’d been on his way out the door, intent to scream bloody murder for a member of medical staff, when the Lump had abruptly resumed its usual wall-rattling cacophony of snores. Arnold reasoned that it was unlikely anyone, even a Lump, could make that kind of racket without the proper airflow, and he’d decided to postpone calling in the undertakers.

Aside from the fact that the Lump never seemed to move when Arn was in the room, and the fact that it made an awful din--especially in the evenings, around three in the morning, when Arnold was trying hard to sleep—it smelled. It had a dark, musky, unwashed stench with an undercurrent of nostril-burning spiciness and the unmistakable odor of cheap, stale lager. The latter, of course, being a scent Arnold had only experienced upon his initial arrival at the university four years prior. Uni students, especially artistic types, tended to drink the strongest stuff they could get their hands on for the least amount of dollar-pounds. The gag inducing scent of liquor that rolled off the Lump from time to time, most pungent when the Lump flopped about to another side or on its stomach, was of the absolute cheapest, nastiest, lowest quality swill that poverty could buy.

So, the Lump was noisy, smelly, and generally always _there_. And it was, as stated, starting to get on Arnold Rimmer’s last nerve like the swollen boils on the bum of an old pub dog: unwanted, unnecessary, and starting to itch awfully.

In the old days, back in grammar school, he would have probably snapped completely. This was before the divorcing of his parents and his later, triumphant breaking away from Io and its oppressive atmosphere (figuratively, of course, as Io didn’t actually possess an atmo of its own and what was artificially present was actually quite light, when compared with many other life-bearing moons). His temper had been impossible to manage, in those days. He’d always been blowing up over small things, always screaming and kicking against anyone or anything that caused him the slightest twinge of discomfort. Looking back on those times was embarrassing, to say the least, but he couldn’t afford to ignore his past. Those who refused to acknowledge history were doomed to repeat it, and Arnold would honestly rather die than go back to how things, how he, used to be.

Instead of losing his top, or even addressing the Lump at all, Arnold had simply begun to spend as little time in his room as possible. There were plenty of other places to focus on his work, after all. Most of the studios on campus were open 24/7 (and, oh, how that concept had been difficult to comprehend, initially, for a naive kid from Io who’d never been allowed outside the house after the simulated dark, except, of course, when he’d been left outside as punishment for his many childhood sins). Arnold was probably getting more work done this semester than ever before, and the night-time service droids in Old Rugger’s Studio knew him by name. His subsequently high marks and rapidly growing portfolio were some of the few positive aspects of being forced into communal living with the Lump, at least. If it weren’t for the dire necessity of sleeping in a real bed each night—as “real” as the university’s shoddy bunk beds and thin mattresses could be—he could have probably avoided the issue altogether. But sleep he must, and the only place for it was in his own dorm. Their dorm, that was. His and the Lump’s.

The Lump was not actually called that. The student profile Arnold had been given at the beginning of the term said that its—no, his, of course—name was David Lister. He was a few years younger than Arnold, and was only in his first semester, going for a Bachelor’s of Arts. Considering his track record of constant daytime sleeping and persistent nighttime drinking, it would probably be his last semester as well as his first. Sometimes Arnold wondered if the eventual dismissal of his roommate would secure him his own room, again, like he’d had as an undergraduate. That would be nice, and it was probably what he deserved, considering he was now at the graduate level and a teacher’s assistant, besides. By rights, he should have been in graduate housing with the rest of his peers with his own private space. As it was, however, his funds were especially tight now that he was coming into the fifth year of his upper education. The option of throwing in a few more dollar-pounds per semester for better, more private, accommodations simply wasn’t his to buy. Before, as a lower classman, he’d had luck and circumstance on his side; the university had strict policies regarding students with troubled family backgrounds and their need for a safe, personal space. That consideration went out the window, it seemed, once one was more mature and participating in upper-level education.

All of the bad things—always being skint, having to work around the clock to meet class deadlines and work deadlines to keep Professor Marco appeased, forever feeling on edge because that day, whatever day it happened to be at the time, might be the one on which his family decided to track him down and drag him back to Io—would be worth it in the end. Thanks to his sheer desperation for a life of his own making, Arnold was right on schedule to achieve his Big Plans. He wanted a life that would make him feel secure and settled as well as allow him an outlet for his creative drives. He’d scrambled his way into university and was now well on his way toward all the experience and education required to teach others the arts and continue his own personal projects on the side. From “up, up the ziggurat” to “living comfortably.” Such was the sort of ideal life that Dr. Marco, his long-time mentor and part-time employer, lived. It was also an existence that was utterly outside of what his parents had insisted he achieve since the day of his birth. The fact that he was rebelling to such an extent, even as far outside of their notice as he now was, made it all the sweeter.

“Oi, Arnold!”

Rimmer shook himself out of his thoughts. He was supposed to be making a rapid scuttle to class, not musing about the Lump’s usual nonsense and his own hopes for the future. There would be time for that sort of deep thinking later, once this damn lecture was over and done with. Arnold cleared his throat nervously, trying to head off a terror-stricken squeak in his voice as he answered back to the call. His heart was absolutely thrumming, even his circulatory system dreading the necessary torture ahead.

“Hello, Travers. Bit early, aren’t you?”

Shelby Travers, one of Dr. Marco’s—and, today, Rimmer’s—students rolled her eyes fondly. “We’re not back on that surname stuff, are we, Arnie? At least you’ve stopped with that ‘Miss’ crap you used to do. I honestly thought were taking the piss those first few weeks. Now I know you better, though, so I know it can’t possibly be a joke, considering you’ve got no sense of humor.”

Travers—Shelby—was a couple of years Rimmer’s junior. He’d been her assigned dorm father her first year, and, as such, had been forced by the conventions of campus policy to spend quite a lot of time chaperoning her excursions both academic and not-actually-educational-at-all. That enforced prolonged contact was the only possible reason Arnold could think of as to why she seemed to want to be—or, rather, why she _was_ —his friend. He didn’t have many friends, what with his constant inability to keep his feet out of his mouth and the fact that he was too damn busy to socialize. Even so, Shelby stuck with him. She took his often-made social blunders with a tolerant smile and a light smack to the arm, and she never pressed Arnold to spend time with her unless he wanted to. A tiny, well-hidden part of Rimmer was extremely grateful for her friendship and her remarkable loyalty.

A larger, more obvious, part of him was a total git. “It would be inappropriate, _Miss_ Travers. Just as it is highly inappropriate for you to use my first name during a class,” he sniffed, quickening his pace a bit. Shelby took two steps to his one and kept right alongside, much to his exasperation.

“It’s not during a class, you ninny. We’re not even to the room, yet. And even if we were, so what? You’re not a real teacher, are you? You’re just filling in to get your credits and so ol’ Marco can skip out.”

Arnold gritted his teeth lightly, allowing his initial, bitter response to form in his head and then form right out of it again. It was a visualization trick that had taken some years to learn, and it served him well. He took a few seconds to watch _‘I’m more of a real teacher than you are a stupid tart, and that’s saying something’_ break apart like fluffy, wind-strewn clouds in his mind’s eye before speaking. “It would mean a lot to me if you’d…if you’d do the proper thing,” he managed, wincing slightly at the bald truth of it. Shelby’s rapid double steps faltered a little. Trotting to catch up, she laid a hand gently on Rimmer’s arm for a moment, giving it a friendly squeeze. Rimmer pointedly did not look at her face. He knew her well enough to know that her dark, wide-set eyes were melted soft with pity and understanding. He’d seen that look on her face once, early on, and now did all he could _not_ to notice when it returned. He never, ever should have told her about Io. It didn’t matter that it’d been their first week as dorm family, and she’d convinced him to imbibe, and he’d been on the edge of stinking drunk enough at the time to actually feel quite good about spewing his secrets all over her--and, later, his dinner. He still felt sort of bad about ruining her shoes like that.

“All right then, _Mr. Rimmer_ ,” she said, warmly. And then she pinched where’d she’d been friendly squeezing, before, and Arnold yelped before swatting at her with his leather satchel.

“So, on a scale from a mossy boulder to Linda Blair, how close to hurling are you at this    moment?” Shelby questioned as she skirted ahead and opened the classroom door for them both. Arnold ducked into the dim classroom and muttered the voice-activation routine for the lights before setting his satchel down near the podium at the front of the smallish classroom. He was teaching an introductory art history course, that day, which required little in the way of physical space or amenities. Dr. Marco had a reputation for “skipping out,” as Shelby put it, on this particular lecture quite regularly.

“Teaching the little blighters the history of the thing is all well and good, Rimmer, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit about telling those slack-jawed, glassy-eyed business-school rejects all about the wonders of Picasso’s color palates when I could be fostering real talent in a young artist’s soul. You understand that, don’t you? Good. Here’s the disks for my notes.  Just pop’em up on the projector and let the bastards scribble it all down, eh?”

Arnold swallowed thickly, feeling bitter bile against the back of his throat. “Please don’t mention…that…right now,” he pleaded.

Shelby grinned, “So pretty much at Linda Blair, then. That’s all I need to know, sir.” And she promptly sat as far out of the line of possible vomit fire as possible.

Rimmer swallowed again and tried not to think nasty names at her. He didn’t have time for the cloud trick, right then. Thanks to the interference of the Lump’s sonorous snores, he’d barely slept at all the night before. As a result, he’d slept right into his revision time and his daily workout, and had had to scramble like mad to make it across campus to the classroom in time. The Lump hadn’t stirred at all, not even when Rimmer’s foot had skidded in a wet patch of their shared shower and he’d landed hard on his arse, taking several bottles of soaps—all his, of course, because Heaven forbid the Lump ever do more than rinse himself off, if that—down with him in a frightful clatter. His bruised cheeks still hurt.

Arnold set up for class as he’d practiced over and over again in his mind each night that week. The routine was so well formulated and rehearsed that he could have done it even if he were as asleep as he wished he could have been the previous night. Even so, his hands shook, and he was sweating like a Hoppist going uphill to Sunday service.

 _How are you ever going to teach properly if this is what a simple lecture does to you?_ He demanded of himself, feeling a flash of the old, self-loathing anger. It wasn’t even close to as difficult or humiliating as all of those Astro-navigation pre-tests, or even the entrance exam to his old grammar school (he’d barely signed his name to the first sheet before passing right out; if it hadn’t been for the tight-lipped intercession of Mummy, he never would have gotten in at all). But it wasn’t about difficulty, in the end. It was the prospect of all of those eyes on him. All those eyes who would know, somehow, that he was a fraud. They would know how Arnold J. Rimmer as a never-do-well, a failure at everything he’d ever tried, a man who had failed at what should have been the simplest thing of all. That was, earning the care and attention of his own flesh and blood.

Never mind that Arnold’s marks were some of the highest in his year, or even that Dr. Marco had specifically requested him as his assistant, despite the fact that there were many more students with higher credentials and much, much more promising prospects in the field. Never mind that everyone in Arnold’s level thought he was quite nice, actually. And never mind that Shelby and her friends thought he was funny, and interesting, and a real whiz with pencil arts and the odd oil work. Never mind that even the Lump thought he was a pretty good guy—have to be a good sort not to infringe on a mate’s sleeping and drinking habits any, right? Arnold didn’t know most of those things, consciously. And even if someone had sat him right down and told him so, he’d never have believed it.

As a kid, he’d been the lowest of the low at home and at school. Even when he’d huddled alone in the most shadowed, secret places he could find to hide in, he was still the biggest loser in the place. Despite all of the progress he’d made and all the effort spent to reign in his negative impulses, broadcast his better ones, and overcome his tendency to blame everyone else for his own failings, he couldn’t quite see himself as anything other than a worthless, jerky, hopeless smeghead.

And they would all know the second they set eyes on him. And then they’d hate him.

Arnold blinked, dazedly, and realized in some distant way that he was on the floor, and his already bruised behind was smarting with fresh pain. “Wha--?” he managed, intelligently.

Shelby had one sturdy arm under his own and was grunting lightly, trying and failing to tug his much taller frame upright once more. “Jeez, Arnie,” she panted faintly, eyes wide with concern and surprise. “One second you were sorting out the 3D projector and then the next second your eyes were rolled back in your head, and you went down. It was horrid. Are you all right? Should I call someone?”

Rimmer stiffened at the idea of anyone else being made aware that he’d bloody fainted right before his first real lecture. He shook his head vigorously and flailed his hands at Shelby, batting her off none-too-gently. “No!” He swallowed, grimacing at the younger woman’s startled expression. He reigned in his panic and pushed his humiliation roughly aside, getting to his feet on his own. He cleared his throat and patted nonexistent dirt from his trouser legs, unable to keep his cheeks from burning. “No, thank you,” he said, much more gently. “Sorry, old thing,” he said, purposefully throwing in what he considered his ‘Ace words,’ the sort of ridiculously chummy stuff that brave, beloved hero types used in films and books. Who knew smegging why, but that sort of drivel seemed to foster friendliness and reassurance. At least, it did in Shelby. He’d never been ballsy enough to try it on anyone else. “I guess I must have locked my knees up or something.” He swallowed and rubbed his sweaty palms on his trouser legs one last time for good measure.

Shelby tutted and reached up on tiptoe to run her fingers quickly and efficiently through his hair and then down around his secondhand beige tie, straightening it. “There. At least you look presentable, again. Shame about your skin, though.”

“My skin?” Rimmer questioned, unable to keep his voice from ending on a rather indignant squeak.

Shelby smiled, her shoulders relaxing at the familiar sound, assured that he was as all right as Arnold Rimmer could get, considering. “Yes, you’re as pasty as a meat pie. Don’t worry, maybe people will blame the lighting in here. It’s rather awful.”

Arnold huffed a laugh, a startled expression of unexpected humor. “You’d think an art school would take that sort of thing into consideration,” he replied, relaxing into the feeling of warm amusement. A faint smile tugged at his lips long after Shelby had returned to her seat and he had actually gotten the projector working properly. The rest of the class began to file in, but Arnold took in a deep breath and let the majority of his anxiety go with it as he breathed out. He’d fainted quite often in his lifetime, but this was the first time he’d done it since leaving Io. He’d been certain, upon coming to his senses, that Shelby would react as people—his family, his teachers, his classmates—always had when he went lights out. He’d anticipated annoyance or anger or laughter at his expense. He’d fully expected to be made a mockery of, or treated like the weak little slime he was. But, no. Shelby had pulled him smartly back to rights and made him laugh before quietly retreating, as if it’d never happened at all.

Perhaps it was the sheer shock of her decency that shook him out of his fear, or maybe it was that there wasn’t much to get upset over once one had already gotten so nervous as to fall down senseless. Whatever the exact reason behind it, Arnold found himself tackling his lecture with all the determination and detail-oriented attention he used to give his grammar school geography assignments, or his latest pencil works. It wasn’t the best, most inspiring art history lecture of all time or anything, but it wasn’t at all awful. Some students even stayed a few minutes after the bell to ask him questions. Ask _him_ questions! As if he was a proper teacher and had proper answers. And, actually, he _did_ have quite a few answers to give. The students seemed pleased with his responses, and one girl who looked vaguely familiar—one of Shelby’s friends, perhaps—even smiled brightly and congratulated him on his first successful solo class.

Shelby smoothly merged up against Arnold’s long strides as he made his way out of the classroom and back across the quad. “So, then. You didn’t barf.”

“No,” Arn agreed, though a bit suspiciously. He expected the fainting spell would come up, now. Maybe he’d been wrong, before, and she was only bidding her time, waiting to cause him humiliation one-on-one. He could understand that; his brothers had preferred to dole out their torment in that intimate manner, as well.

Shelby grinned brightly and nudged his shoulder as she passed him by, heading off toward her next class. “You did quite well, Mr. Rimmer,” she sang out over her shoulder, “Dr. Marco’ll be proud. You’ll probably end up teaching all of his least favorite classes now, you know!” And then she’d disappeared into the confusing crowd of commuting students.

 Feeling tingly all over, from somewhere under his breastbone to the tips of his toes and fingers, Arnold grinned after her. His face hurt almost immediately from the strain of putting long-neglected muscles into sudden, extreme use. He’d done something right! Really right! And he’d only fainted once, and hadn’t thrown up at all! _Well done, Ace_! Turning sharply—almost militarily, his mother would have been grudgingly pleased to see—on his heel, Arn made his way to the open studio with a spring in his step and a song in his heart. He even whistled a bit of it as he cross the quad.

 _There’s a somebody I’m longing to see/ I hope that she turns out to be/ someone to watch over me_.


	2. Chapter 2

Arnold was so pleased with himself and his clear--and only slightly mortifying--success that he decided to treat himself to a quiet night in. If he timed it  right, he could slip in and out again in that hazy span of dark time after the Lump went out and before he returned, smelling even more strongly than before of the cheap lager and, sometimes, of even cheaper curry, too.

For the most part, Arnold tended to miss these moments of motion utterly. He was always careful to be at the studio when the Lump left and he was always asleep—or at least too close to sleep to bother rousing himself up—by the time the Lump returned. It wasn’t that Arnold was avoiding his roommate on purpose. He’d started off that way as a self-preservation technique (and as a way to prevent himself from wringing the other man’s phlegm-blocked throat) and now he was so lost in the habit that it never occurred to him that all he’d have to do to meet the bloke properly would be to stick around their shared quarters a little later in the day than usual.

The point is, he probably would have managed to slip in for some reading and a cup of precious tea—his tastes for tea were high and his budget was not, leading to a strict rationing of his personal stash—and right back to his usual schedule again afterward without ever seeing the Lump, if not for Shelby.

Shelby was also pleased with Arnold’s success that day, and she had decided that he should treat himself by going along with her and her closest mates to the club.

“I’m not into that sort of scene, is the thing,” Arnold tried, one in a long series of attempts to get the girl to leave him in peace. He really did hate the club and bar scene. For one thing, he disliked getting drunk. It always made him far too pliant and talkative, and eventually he got morose—but, worse, maudlin _and_ talkative, and that meant all of his carefully controlled and guarded feelings and memories came pouring out of him. For another thing, there was the noise and the clambering, sweaty crush of crowds. It was emotionally and mentally draining. Rimmer disliked and mistrusted most people even on his best days. Bunches and bunches of people together were even worse, and adding drinking and merriment into the mix was a surefire way to ruin even an exceptionally good day. And it had, in fact, been such a good day that he was loath to have it yanked from his clinging fingers and so brutally destroyed. He tried to tell Shelby all of that without actually telling her. He wanted to explain himself, but he was so desperate not to give too much of himself away that it all came out in a strange, weak, and whining rush of pathetic excuses. Instead of explaining his dislike of crowds and his fears about the effect of drink on his self-control, he kept talking about how he was kind of tired, and anyway she’d probably have so much more fun without him, right? And then the more he tried to convince her, the more frustrated he became, and the more frustration he felt, the more he fell into old habits, until he was calling her insulting names and telling her sharply to go smeg off. The more of his own words he heard leave his mouth, the more he started to agree with Shelby. _God, you sad sack. You mean goit.  Go out and have some fun for a smegging change, you soulless, heartless git._

He caved. Rimmer apologized rather stiffly for his rudeness, left his book and all hopes for a good cup of tea behind, and allowed Shelby to pull him, literally, along off campus and down along the man-made river toward the college bar downtown. It was a nice, temperate evening, with a big, brilliant moon that rivaled even the intense light pollution of the town. Arn took in a deep breath and found that, light smog aside, it was actually rather nice to be out and about.

As a child, Arnold had never, ever imagined himself moving to Earth. It wasn’t that he was loath to leave Io, because even when he was most under the thumb of his parents he’d never wanted to stay on that moon forever; he’d imagined himself doing as he was told and entering the Corps. And once you were in the Space Corps, you didn’t go to Earth. You went to terraformed planetoids and asteroid belts and space stations among the stars. Mummy had always said that nothing worth anything was back on Earth but beatnik loafers and mutated, retarded scum. It was all wastelands and pollution and not a pious soul for miles.

Arnold couldn’t give two wet, sticky raspberries about piety, and most of the people he liked most on campus—Shelby included—were Earthlings. Sure, the planet had been pretty well worked over in the last couple centuries. It’d started to go pretty well downhill around the 20th century, in fact, as far as history told. A lot of the old continents were gone, now, flooded with glacier water because of global warming. And, granted, the ozone layer had gone mostly out ages ago, and had to be replaced with a simulated concoction that was so wickedly scientific that Arnold, who barely knew the first thing about the most basic of astrophysics, couldn’t have told you what it was for a million dollar-pounds. He tended to buy into the story that there was a giant toupee over the gaping ozone hole. In short, it wasn’t exactly a paradise planet. But it was still thriving, still crawling with life. Earth remained densely populated with the astoundingly resilient species that was the human race. And as much as Arnold was wary of humanity as a whole, and didn’t see the point in being optimistic about it all, either, he couldn’t deny that coming to the planet of his ancestors for university had actually been a pretty smegging good idea.

Shelby slid her arm through his and bumped their hips in a friendly way. Arnold tried not to sigh. It was impossible to convince Shelby Travers that she needed to treat him like an authority figure and not another of her chums. If nothing else, he used to argue, people would get the wrong idea.

“They’ll think we’re screwing,” he’d said, bluntly, one night. He had been more than a little tipsy at the time. Shelby had had a birthday bash, and while she couldn’t convince him to go to the actual party, he’d grudgingly agreed to meet her for a night cap afterward, the two of them on the roof of Old Rugger’s Studio. The building was the oldest studio building on campus, dating back to the 21st century and still retaining most of its original red bricks. The university had had a glass dome installed over its roof about fifty years prior to Rimmer’s arrival on campus, and Rugger’s had since become a popular place for small groups of students to go and relax together and try to see the stars through the glare of the town lights and the haze of pollution in the skies. They all called it the Observation Deck, as a joke. It was Rimmer’s favorite place on campus, and he often went up there alone to sketch.

Shelby had laughed at the accusation of impropriety. “No, they won’t think we’re doin’ it, Arn,” she’d said, with complete confidence.

Rimmer had squinted at her, trying to resolve the drunkenly duplicated Shelbies into one bright-eyed girl. “Why not?” he’d questioned, voice squeaking in offense.

She’d giggled and ruffled his hair, “Because, you dolt, I’m obviously not remotely interested in you.”

“Oh,” he’d said, and understood that completely because, well, no woman ever was interested in Arnie Rimmer, right?

Something about his tone must have been especially dejected sounding, because Shelby had flicked his ear and said, sharply, “You gimboid. I’m not interested in you whatsoever because, while you are an extremely lovely individual and all that stuff and bother, you have far too much manliness to be going on with. You understand? I only like folks that’re ladies.”

And that was when Rimmer realized that his best and only friend was quite gay. Fortunately, at the time, he’d been too drunk to let the idea send him running. He’d known Shelby quite intimately for almost a year, by then. He’d been slowly but surely untangling himself from the ideals and convictions of his home-world and his family for nearly three times as long. And, so far, he had done a pretty fair job of sorting out the good lessons he’d been given (the importance of ambition, determination, and perseverance despite the odds) from the   smegging awful things (like racism, elitism, sexism, and, most relevant to the situation at the time, homophobia). The problem was that he sometimes forgot to ignore his life-long conditioning and fell back into the old, comfortable, horrible mindset.

When he had woke up the next morning, sprawled along the rooftop with Shelby nestled up against his side, he’d allowed himself a good five minute span of silent time in which to logically reason his way around and away from his instinctive disgust. Mummy had always said that people who were, well, that way, were animals. She insisted that they would all burn in eternal fire, and not because they didn’t hop dutifully every seventh day. Rimmer’s father had even once laid into him once most viciously when Rimmer, then only four or five, had noticed the shining blonde hair of the neighbor boy and, with the eye of a budding artist, had declared that the boy was “very pretty.” Arnold hadn’t been able to hardly move for a full day after, and for the next fortnight following, he did all he could not to have to sit down, even choosing to put in extra hopping time at dinner to avoid the pain.

Shelby had startled him with a sleepy, “You ok, Arnie?”

And he’d looked down at her, staring into her wide-set brown eyes and noting the way her dark brown skin took on a particularly radiant glow in the light of the rising sun, and had smiled back, a warm glow of pure friendly affection blossoming in his chest.

“I’m marvelous,” he assured, brightly, savoring the sensation of sharing a hangover with a real, honest-to-goodness friend, “everything is right-o-roonie!”

And she’d laughed and smacked his arm lightly in her usual fond way and begged him to never, ever say “right-o-roonie” again.

The muffled ruckus of the club as they came up on it drew Rimmer out of his reminiscing. He felt a renewed flood of nerves and, in that moment of weakness, pressed a bit closer to Shelby’s side, actually grateful for the arm wrapped around his own. She offered him a brief smile and pulled him into the short line of waiting students.

“Big crowd tonight,” Shelby noted, though completely lacking in the trepidation that Arnold felt with the same revelation, “Must be because of that new band everyone is on about.”

“New band?” Arnold questioned, distractedly. He didn’t care about any band, but keeping somewhat involved in conversation would go a long way to easing his worries about this night. He wished, not for the first time, that he had taken the advice of a psychology major he’d met at freshman orientation years before and gotten himself a prescription for anti-anxiety meds. But there was the problem of side effects, of course, and the necessity of regular therapy as part of the treatment and, well, in the end, he’d rather feel jittery in large crowds. At least he could admit he had problems, now. That was more than he was capable of when he was fourteen.

“Yeah,” Shelby replied, having to raise her voice a bit as the club’s door opened to let a few more people in and the noise—that’s all it could be called—filtered out into the street as the students pressed in. “They have a funny name. Like, Smeg Heads? Smeg and the Heads? I’m not sure. Anyway, from what I’ve heard around campus, they are bloody awful. Truly terrible.”

Rimmer blinked in confusion, properly pulled from his thoughts for the first time all day, “But why are all of these people here to listen to them if they’re so rotten?” he demanded, baffled.

Shelby laughed, “I don’t know. It’s a good joke, isn’t it? You get to go in and later on you whinge about how awful the music was to all the people who didn’t go out with you, right? And then all of your friends say ‘no way, it can’t have been that awful!’ and then everyone ends up coming down here _en masse_ to prove how truly horrible the band is.”

Arnold stared at her, mouth slightly agape and at a total loss for words for a few seconds. When he finally did blurt something out, it was foot-in-mouth worthy, as usual. “That’s smegging insane. These people clearly don’t have a single solitary brain cell between them. That’s what they call entertainment?” He paused a moment, affecting an accent much altered from his own nasal, posh tones. “That’s like saying ‘Oi, mate, I heard there’s a place uptown that does deals on rotten food, shall we go for it? It tastes truly awful and you’ll be vomiting for weeks after, I swear on me mum.’ Smegging insane.”

Shelby’s expression flickered, as it sometimes did when Arnold was being especially disagreeable or downright mean. She tossed her head a bit, tight curls bouncing, and smacked him with unusual heft on the arm. “Don’t be a git, Arn,” she scolded, severely.

Rimmer ducked his head, staring at his feet. The old, worn lace-up boots were in desperate need of a polish. He looked nearly as scrummy as the Lump. Assuming, anyway, that the Lump typically wore shoes at all. Arnold had only ever seen the man’s disgusting socks. _Dammit, Rimmer_ , Arnold thought at himself, fiercely. It was bad enough he’d fallen back on being a jerk to Shelby, now he was trying to compare himself to his gritty roommate to try and make himself off as better than the other man. And, worst yet, he wasn’t entirely sure he was succeeding. Sure, the Lump had gross socks and smelled of rubbish bins, but at least he probably didn’t go around insulting people every time he opened his mouth. Unless one wanted to count his horrific snoring as an affront. Which, actually—

“Arnold,” Shelby said, softly, touching his arm until he looked up from his shoes and met her eyes, instead. “Are you all right? You’ve been a real space cadet today. Is something on your mind?”

Rimmer sighed. One of the reasons he’d been so against being dragged out and liquored up on this particular night was that he knew, he  knew, that he was going to end up sobbing all over Shelby’s shoulder. It wasn’t a good idea to get him plastered at the best of times, not if one wanted to stay clear of all sorts of bodily fluids, but that night was an especially bad time for sheer drunken honesty. Maybe if he took this opportunity to spit it out now, while he was stone sober, he could save himself and Shelby both some trouble.

He was about to explain when the door to the club opened before them and they were ushered inside without so much as a “by your leave.” Rimmer immediately found himself crammed up against a mass of at least a half dozen grinding, shimmying bodies in various states of dress. His yelp of distaste and surprise didn’t even register to his own ears; all sound was engulfed entirely by the demon-esque yowl and screech coming out in a crazy, staccato beat from the speakers. He was too far away from the stage to see the smeggy band responsible, at the moment, but there was a part of himself that was pretty sure that was a blessing in the midst of the billion and one curses this horrible place had to offer.

“Shelby?” he yelled, having lost her in the crowd almost as soon as they’d crossed the threshold. She was quite a few inches shorter than the average and blended in far too well. He felt a wave of panic threaten to choke him, realizing he’d been left to fend for himself in this undulating mess of bodies with no means to make himself seen or heard over the spastic, neon lights and the grating, window-rattling noise.

A dancing body or two pushed him from behind and he found himself staggering forward a few steps before another small group barreled into him, throwing him into an occupied table. He stammered out a high-pitched apology to the woman he’d fallen on and grimaced at the sharp pain in his hip where he’d smashed into the surprisingly sharp backing of her seat. The woman looked at him in drunken confusion, apparently unable to hear him over the band or comprehend why, exactly, this stranger was throwing himself on top of her. Regardless of whatever reasons he may have had, she definitely wasn’t impressed. Rimmer realized that the two men sitting with the woman were eyeing him, looking progressively more agitated the longer he tried to wave his hands at the woman and express his apologies. Taking the hint, finally, Arnold pressed his way into the moving mob in an attempt to avoid getting his face bashed in. Unable and unwilling to fight it, anymore, he groaned in defeat and allowed the current of the mob of club patrons to take him wherever it pleased.

That was how he ended up next to the small raised stage on the wall far opposite the bar, where he realized with a jolting shock, that he knew the lead singer’s face.

“The Lump,” he breathed, amazed and briefly confused. It was rather like seeing one’s pastor at the grocery store instead of behind the pulpit. That same jarring sense of unreality pervaded. In Arnold’s mind, the Lump and the top bunk of their dorm room were one and the same thing. Sure, he was aware in some distant way that David Lister sometimes was _not_ in his bunk and was, in fact, somewhere else, and probably somewhere with booze, at that. But he’d never quite seen it happen. He’d only barely seen the man do more than flip and flop about on the bunk like a floundering fish, in fact. And yet, there he stood, semi-straddling the standing microphone and wailing tunelessly into its head while his fat, stubby fingers scratched over a battered guitar with too many E strings. God, it sounded _awful_.

Rimmer was only beginning to put this strange new puzzle together in his brain—not at all aided by the residual buzz of anxiety in his mind or the ear-drum-murdering noise all around—when the din in question abruptly stopped.

“An’ that was ‘Om,’ our greatest hit. We’re gonna take a quick break for a bit, though, ‘cos I think one of me strings snapped about fifteen minutes back, and I oughta fix it.”

This was greeted with a roar of drunken laughter and a spattering of applause, which David Lister accepted with a wide, toothy grin and a completely sincere bow. He obviously had no idea whatsoever that everyone in the joint thought he and his band were utter crap. Arnold would almost have been sorry for him excepting that, well, the man seemed so dammed cheerful that his pity would feel misplaced. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, that irked him deep down in his soul. Maybe he reacting subconsciously, realizing how similar the man’s insufferable singing sounded like his equally insufferable snoring.

The brief reprieve for his throbbing ear drums lasted only as long as it took someone or other off stage to rig up the sound system to start playing the Top Fifty hits as loudly as the stereo system allowed. Call him old fashioned, but Rimmer had never developed a taste for Rastabilly Skank. Honestly, he wasn’t much of a music person at all. The only music he’d listened to on a regular basis was the old Hammond organ in his parents’ church and that, he had to admit, had lost its appeal long before he left home.

Even Rastabilly at his loudest level was easier on the ears than Smeg and the Heads. Either that or Rimmer had lost all hearing in his left ear; it was difficult to be certain. Shaking his head briskly in the hopes of bringing sound into proper focus again, Arnold managed to maneuver his way over to the nearest section of clear wall and leaned against it. He didn’t even care that he was playing into the stereotype of the typical wallflower; the wall was far sturdier against his back, at the moment, than the floor was against his feet. He wondered, dizzily, if he’d actually managed to suffer serious inner ear damage simply because of the Lu—Lister’s horrible band. Fighting down a wave of nausea for the umpteenth time that day, Rimmer swallowed heavily and closed his eyes to try and reorient himself.

“Eh, guy, you a’right?”

No. It couldn’t be. Warily, Arn opened one eye and glanced over at the man beside him who was currently leaning rather close into Rimmer’s personal space. David Lister’s pudgy, gerbil-esque face was not suited to expressing serious concern. It pulled his lips all funny and made his eyes oddly scrunched. Idly, Arnold decided he preferred the man’s enormous grin or even the cavern-mouthed, gaping expression he took on in the middle of a snore.

“My ears are ringing,” he shouted back at the man. Arnold felt a flicker of amusement as Lister reared back. Apparently he was shouting much more loudly than he thought, and right in the other man’s face, too. Served him right.

“Sorry,” Arn apologized, regardless. While trying to find his place outside of Io, he’d learned rather quickly that the best way to not come off as a total git was to be contrite when necessary, and sometimes even when it wasn’t necessary at all. "Never apologize, never explain” had been one of his father’s many favorite maxims. It had also been the first rule Arnold had cast aside the moment the transport had lifted off from Io.

Lister’s expression of concern melted into that big, gormless grin again. “S’all right, man. I think maybe I ought to be apologizing to you, actually. Ringing ears an’ headaches are a pretty common side effect of Smeg and the Heads. S’kinda of the thing I’m most proud of about it, actually, since there’s not much else to take pride in ‘bout it, you know? I mean, we’re crap, but at least we’re smegging loud.”

Rimmer blinked, baffled, “You mean you know you’re crap?”

Lister’s beam went up a notch. Something about the wideness and brightness of his expression reminded Rimmer quite suddenly of his childhood. He could remember, dimly, hanging around the local arcade when Frank and John went to play games with their allowance money. Arnold never had any allowance money to speak of—he could never seem to earn it—but his brothers often took him along, anyway, because they liked to try and toss him into the skeeball game when the manager wasn’t looking. _It’s like a_ _pinball machine_ , Arnold’s brain finally supplied. Lister’s smile was like watching a pinball machine light up after a won game, all flickering circles of light and excitable siren sounds. It made his smooth gerbil face into something brilliant and difficult to ignore.

            “Yeah, man. I mean, when we was kids we thought we’d be right on the top of the charts, you know? Thought it was all New Age an’ different. But after a while it was pretty obvious that we were actually just shitty. Doesn’t matter much, I guess. We always pull in a pretty big crowd the first couple of weeks, an’ then once the novelty wears off, I guess that’s done ‘til the next time me and the boys can get together somewhere else.” Lister’s eyes narrowed a little, his grin dying down into more of a smirk. “You sure you’re all right, man? S’ you’re staring at my face. My mouth, actually. Can you still not hear a’right? I can talk louder, if you want.”

            Arnold cleared his throat, his confusion and dim amusement with the whole situation rapidly turning into panic. The man didn’t seem to recognize him, for one thing. And while that suited Arnold fine, for the moment, he was wary of letting on that they happened to share a room, actually. What if the man decided that now they’d met properly that they had some sort of obligation to be chummy and sociable all the time? Arnold quite liked the way his term was going, a few interrupted sleep cycles and pervading stench notwithstanding. Oddly enough, Lister didn’t smell nearly as bad now as he did in their room. Maybe that was simply the benefit of free-moving air in a larger space. Or maybe it was because the most pervading odor of lager was lost in the boozey smell the club already possessed. Regardless, Arn didn’t want Lister to get any ideas about fostering some kind of friendship between the two of them. Arnold already had a friend as it was, and even that was about as casual and easy to maintain as he could make it. If Lister decided they should spend actual time together, the only possible outcome as far as Rimmer could see was that, eventually, inevitably, it’d all go tits up and shake his carefully maintained life into ruins as a result. Naturally, of course, that explosive falling out would also be entirely Rimmer’s fault.

            Then, by some grace of God never before experienced by one Arnold J. Rimmer, Shelby seemed to materialize at his elbow from thin air. She offered him a grin and a drink. Anxious to appear as normal as possible while still remaining aloof, Arnold took the offered bottle and immediately put it too his lips, drinking about half of it down in a few solid gulps. Lister whistled appreciatively. “Don’t waste any time getting a good drunk on, do ya?”

            Shelby stared up at Arnold in a mix of bafflement and alarm. Rimmer was a lightweight, and it was always as difficult as pulling the teeth out of a low-jawed hippo to get the man to partake at all. Yet here he was, downing half a beer without so much as a wince. Arnold could tell by the way she poked his ribs with a well-polished fingernail that she knew he was up to something and, combined with her earlier concern at his distracted behavior, he rather expected he would end the night off by crying into her shoulder and possibly heaving up on her shoes, again.

            Shelby turned her attention away from her weird friend and offered a hand to the man standing beside him. “Hi, I’m Shelby. You’re Smeg, right?”

            Lister laughed, “Yeah, but, actually, I kinda prefer goin’ by Dave if it’s all the same to you.”

            “Dave?” Shelby frowned a little, the gears in her mind obviously turning. Arnold could practically see the dots connecting there. Wait, no. Were their gears in her brain or dots? Maybe both? God, he was already starting to feel the confusion of the mildly tipsy. “David Lister, right?”

            “That’s what it says on the posters,” Dave agreed, amiably. Arnold had a hard time believing the man was capable of doing anything that wasn’t in some way bubbling over with friendliness, when he was awake. It was simultaneously the most annoying and the most charming personality trait he’d ever encountered.

            “Oh,” Shelby said, distantly. Her gaze flickered from Arnold to Lister and back again, a slight frown pulling at her features.

            Desperately, Arnold tried to telepathically communicate with his friend. _Don’t smeggin’ tell him. Don’t say it. Don’t—_

“Oh, so you’re Arnie’s mysterious roommate, then.”

Clearly, Arn did not, in fact, have any mastery whatsoever over any kind of ESP. Either that or he did and Shelby was ignoring him out of spite. Honestly, it was hard not to think the latter might as easily be the case. Then he remembered earlier in the day, when she’d not mocked him for fainting, and he realized he was—as usual—being a total smeg.

            “Arnie?” Lister questioned. The man dug about in his leather jacket, pulling out what looked to be a hand-rolled cigarette and giving it a light. Rimmer tried hard not to immediately break out into a coughing fit. He’d been told a long time ago that his asthmatic reaction to smoking was completely psychosomatic. And, considering he’d been known to light up himself when especially stressed, that probably was the case. Even so, it was hard to resist the old familiar feeling of tightness that settled determinedly in his chest the moment anyone lit up nearby. “Oh, right,” Lister said around the cig as the end flared up for a moment in a bright burst of flame, “Yeah, the guy’s named Arnold, I’m pretty sure. Can’t remember his last name, at the mo’. Something that sounds kind of pervy, I remember. Don’t really know the man, to be honest. Never see him. Think he’s kind of a prat, though. He irons the towels.”

            Shelby pressed her hand to her mouth. Arnold wasn’t sure if it was a gesture of horror at the obvious social faux paus being made or if she was trying to valiantly smother a laugh.

            “I’m Arnold,” Arnold said, stiff as Lister’s boxer shorts—he knew from experience, as he constantly had to toss the man’s board-like clothes toward the hamper to keep himself from going insane—“Arnold Rimmer.”

            Lister nearly dropped his cigarette in his rush to apologize. “Ah, geez, man. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinkin’, and I’ve  never  seen you goin’ in or out, like, and...can I buy you a drink or something? Honestly, I’ve got my foot so far in my mouth that my toes are wiggling about in me stomach.” The man certainly looked like something was squirming about in his insides. Arnold knew that Lister hadn’t meant any real harm. Even so, it stung, as criticism of his person always did.

            There was once a time when he might have reacted with indignant rage and tried to sliver Lister into pieces with a few scathing barbs before stomping off to the safety of the Observation Deck for a good sulk. The impulse to do all of those things was still a strong one, bubbling right there under the surface of his skin. The heavy scent of Lister’s burning tobacco wasn’t helping him think any more rationally, either.

            Still, better heads prevailed. He took as deep a breath as he dared in the smoky environment and gave a short, jerky nod of his head. “Of course. No harm done. I suppose taking an iron to the towels is a little…excessive.” He paused. “I iron when I’m anxious, and I don’t have enough actual clothes to keep up with my nerves.” Rimmer frowned a little, realizing that somehow or other the beer bottle in his hand had ended up emptied. Well, at least that explained that flash of personal insight. Smegging hell.

            Lister, to Rimmer’s surprise, took the moment with exceedingly good grace. “Oh, is that it? Well, geez, guy. If you are itchin’ that much for some ironing to do, you can always go at some of my kit, instead.”

            Arnold’s face twisted into an expression of disgust. “Your clothes aren’t remotely clean enough to put an iron to them,” he argued, bluntly.

            Lister grinned wider, “Yeah, I suppose that’s true, at that. Never mind, it was only an idea. What about all that time you spend in the shower in the morning? You get the urge to wank whenever you’re anxious, too?”

            Arnold was glad that he’d finished his drink, or else he might have ended up spitting it out in shock. As it was, Shelby was not nearly so lucky. Arn flinched away from the warm spray of beer, but Lister didn’t seem to mind it much at all as droplets rained down and drenched the front of his already well-stained t-shirt. “Oh my god,” Shelby breathed, staring at Lister in awe, “you are the most scrummy, crass, inelegant man I have ever met. If you were a girl, I’d kiss you.”

            “Ya still could,” Lister suggested, giving Shelby a hopeful once over, all five feet nothing of her, “I wouldn’t mind it.”

            Shelby laughed and smacked his arm lightly. Arn tried hard not to feel jealous. “Shut up, Smeg,” she purred happily, “I’m going to go get some more drinks. You want something, Lister?”

            Lister offered up a cheerful, “Yeah, a lager, love, ta much” and turned his attention to Rimmer the moment she’d turned around. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” he said, so easily that Arn was convinced of his sincerity, “Sometimes, well, most times, my mouth is a lot faster than my brain, you know?”

            Arnold ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the liquor there. His hearing was starting to ease back to rights, again, and yet he wasn’t quite sure he was understanding this man right at all. One minute he was chummy as anything, the next he was throwing out insults on Rimmer’s character, and then he was back to being friendly right before dragging all sorts of Rimmer’s personal business out into the room for all to see. Granted, it wasn’t actually much of a surprise, probably, that Arnold spent a pretty fair share of his time getting off in the shower. He was an adult, sexual man, after all. And the shower was the only private place a body had when dorm living. And Arn could concede that Shelby didn’t constitute an entire room of people by any means. So, in the end, no harm was actually done. But it wasn’t the thing to say, was it? Not about someone you’d basically just met. Not in polite company.

            Polite. Polite and proper and the choking smell of cigarettes. Rimmer rubbed absently at his tightening chest. “Do you mind putting that out?” he asked the man, the question coming out far more churlish and high-pitched than he’d intended. Lister blinked in surprise. For a moment, Rimmer thought the man meant to work up an argument, but after a beat he shrugged and dropped the cig to the cement floor, grinding it under the sole of his heavy boot.

            “S’all right. Gotta go back up on stage soonish, anyway. You coulda said something before I lit up, though, man. Waste of a cigarette, having to put it out like that.”

            Arn had not had nearly enough alcohol to explain himself, especially not to his lump of a bunkmate. The man was little more than a complete stranger, despite the fact that Arnold could easily rattle off at least five of the man’s favorite things and mimic perfectly the sound of his guttural snores.

            “I should go check on Shelby,” he muttered, instead.

            “Yeah, okay. Ask her to bring that lager by the stage, huh? Don’t wanna miss me chance for a free drink if I can help it.” His grin, while not quite of pinball luminance, had something of genuine warmth in it. It was like an offer of a handshake in the form of a smile. Arnold didn’t have a clue in hell what to do with it.

            “I will,” was all he said in reply. Then he turned about abruptly and forcibly lost himself to the crowd. Not long after, the wailing sounds of Lister’s guitar and the cutting squeal of his singing filled the club up, edging into the tiny spaces left between thrumming, sticky bodies.

            Rimmer managed to locate Shelby near the bar. She was chatting with a classmate, laughing in that easy way that said she’d had a few drinks and was looking forward to more. Arnold hissed Lister’s request against her ear and then offered up a stilted farewell before pushing off from the bar and wading a desperate path toward the door. Away from the smoke and sound and the lights, Rimmer rested his body against the wall of the club and felt the thrum of the bass line right against his spine. The throbbing against his back was completely out of sync with the thudding rhythm of his heartbeat as it banged about in his still-ringing ears. He took in a few deep, smoggy breaths, fighting against the urge to pull the air in in quick, frantic gasps. He’d stress fainted that morning for the first time in years. He wasn’t about to have his first panic attack in ages on the same smegging day.

            A cold bottle was pressed against his lax fingers. Instinctively, he grabbed hold. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, feeling suddenly tired. He should go back to his dorm. Lister wouldn’t be back for hours, at this rate. It was his only chance for interrupted sleep in a blissful cocoon of silence.

            “Okay,” Shelby agreed, easily. Arnold figured a lot of that ease was down to the fact that she knew he’d eventually tell her, anyway, as long as she got him to drink enough.

            “It’s cheating, you know,” he said, shaking the bottle at her a bit before wrenching off the cap and taking a long pull. He immediately sputtered, only barely managing not to spit it out. “What the _fuck_?” he said, bypassing the smeg all together in his shock. Shelby laughed at his antiquated profanity.

            “Beer’s weak. I thought I’d splurge on something that’ll work a bit quicker. I have an exam tomorrow, Mr. Rimmer, sir, I don’t have time to work you up to it on beer alone. It’s the hard stuff. Don’t ask, just drink.”

            After a moment of hesitation, Arnold did as instructed. The liquid burned like hell going down, but once it hit his guts, it spread out and the fire-y sensation eased into hazy warmth, like he’d swallowed contentment in liquid form. …Oh. And it seemed to go straight to his head, all right, too.

            They shared the bottle back and forth, sitting right up against the club. The likelihood of being caught or reprimanded for this action seemed small. True to its reputation as a liberal minded university town, the law enforcement was pretty lax. There was a time when Rimmer would have chewed his way right through his own fist in his paranoid agony about that slim chance of discovery. Now, it barely registered on his radar at all. He took another swig and savored the burn before passing it back.

            “It’s five years ago today that I left Io,” he began, once he was well enough drunk that his head felt like a balloon and the dark shadows across the street seemed to be dancing along with the thrumming beat of the club behind them.

            “Is it?” Shelby offered, noncommittal. It was a careful response,  enough to let him know she was attentive and listening, but not too much as to scare him off or force his hand. She could have been a therapist, maybe, if she’d wanted to be. In the end, though, her passion was elsewhere. Arnold never understood that, exactly. There were people who could have exceptional talent in one thing, but go off and do another thing, instead, and still be pretty damn amazing at that thing, too. Arnold had been a terrible Corps candidate. He was barely a decent artist, even though art was the closest thing to a true passion the man had. He blinked down at his scruffy shoes and frowned at them, rubbing the toes hard against the sidewalk to scuff them up even more. Might as well.

            “Yesh,” he slurred, after realizing he’d left a long silence between her question and his reply. “Yes,” he said again, to make up for the looming pregnant pause. Pregnant pause. What a silly, silly phrase. What sort of offspring did pauses have, he wondered.

            “Rimmer? Are you too drunk to talk?”

            He shook his head, then wished he hadn’t as the world went all whoopsy daisy. To keep it from turning him upside down, he slid down along the wall and folded his legs under him in an uncoordinated sprawl. “I have legs like a crane,” he commented, dimly.

            “You are tall and gangly,” Shelby agreed as she lowered herself with much more grace—she held her liquor much better than Rimmer did—to the ground.

            Arnold took another swig of the rapidly emptying bottle. He poked a fingernail against the rough texture of the sidewalk. The sidewalks in this area of town were ancient. They were made of old concrete that flaked up in bits if you tried hard enough to dig them out. The fancier, more modern bits of the city were all lights and sleek, smooth metal and delicate glass construction. Rimmer hated it. It reminded him of Io and its damned domes and perfect panes of glass.

            “I left Io five years ago today,” he said, a repeat of information already given, though Shelby didn’t seem to mind. “Lister was smoking,” he added, in what would seem to be a non-sequitur.

            “Oh,” Shelby said, faintly. “Are you okay?”

            “Yes. I …the air was   …” he paused, and rather hoped Shelby would finish the rest of it for him, but she didn’t. “Heavy. But I didn’t, well, I mean. I asked him to put it out. But I think I was a bit rude. A smidgeon.”

            “Rimmer, you are _never_ just ‘a smidgeon’ rude. You are either all rude or not remotely rude. You have no in between.”

            “Don’t call me Rimmer right now. I hate my name,” he said, pounding his feet up and down on the sidewalk on each word for emphasis.

            “Rimmer or Arnold?”

            “Both are pretty smegging awful, don’t you think?”

            “I suppose so,” Shelby said, neutrally. “Is this because of what Lister said?”

            “Uh, obviously not,” Arnold huffed, full of condescension, “Don’t be thick.”

            Shelby kicked his shin none-too-gently. “Don’t be an ass.”

            “Sorry,” he said, and meant it. “Hard not to, sometimes. It just comes out.”

            Rimmer clacked his booted feet together to the pounding rhythm of the Om song as it played against his spine and along all of his bones. “I don’t know why it’s today that gets me down,” he shared, voice soft and musing, “The day I left was the best of all of those days. I should feel like celebrating its anniversary. I should shout my joy from the rooftops and bake a smegging cake and send my parent’s a big, obscene smeg-off card thanking them for their total lack of contribution to my life.”

            “What day do you think you should be upset about?” Shelby asked, carefully, though Arn knew she already knew the answer. It was part of the pseudo-psychology that friends employed, he supposed, though he had no previous experience by which to measure Shelby’s method.

            Arnold hummed a single, thoughtful note, stalling about for time. “The day I decided to get a divorce,” he said, finally. He knew it wasn’t like that, on Earth. On Earth, it was emancipation or some rot. But his lawyers on Io had called it a divorce, and that seemed right enough to Rimmer. It had been a lot like the dissolving of a marriage, in a way. They’d even divided up his stuff. And he, like many participants in a typical divorce case, had completely lost his shirt to his legal team before it was all said and done. Still, it had been worth the cost. It would have been worth twice or even four times as much, for the chance to get away.

            “So why doesn’t it upset you? Why is it today, and not that day, instead?”

            Arnold frowned at his boots, wary of looking at Shelby’s face lest she make that concerned, pitying, expression he was always afraid to see. “Because,” he said, going to take another drink and being damned disappointed to find it empty, “when I left Io, I did something bad. I got away, and I shouldn’t have. And when…when that other day happened….” He shrugged and set the bottle carefully down against his knee, rolling it up and down over his kneecap with a tight, fixated expression on his face. He was obviously concentrating quite hard, forming carefully constructed thoughts in the midst of his hazy-headed drunkenness, fueled by the inhibitions the alcohol allowed. “I think I feel like I deserved it, what they did. And I got to leave them, finally. But s’ ‘cos I did something so terrible that the punishment after was enough to make me realize I had to get away from them,” he admitted, sounding hollow and tired out. “And when it comes to later on, when I’d grown up and I could leave the planet, every year that passes it, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting they’ll show up, and I’ll be punished again.”

            When he was fourteen, he had divorced his parents. It had been surprisingly easy to convince the court that he was being abused. He wasn’t sure, exactly, why it’d never occurred to him to try and tell someone about it all before. He did realize that it was that final moment at the hands of his father, with his brothers and Mummy beside him that had convinced him he couldn’t possibly take it anymore.

            He’d been allowed to stay in school as a ward of the government until he was eighteen. Then, the moment that hellish place released him to the wild, he’d packed up all of his sketchbooks and carefully guarded pencils and a few pairs of underthings and taken the cheapest possible transport to Earth, all the while hearing his Mummy’s litany against that blue marble of a world ringing back and forth between his ears. He’d filled four sketchbooks during the course of that flight, desperate not to allow himself to slip into an attack of contrition and panic. The resulting works were stashed as deeply as possible with a few other sparse belongings under the bunks in his dorm. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, but he also had absolutely no desire to revisit those images again.

            Shelby shifted a bit beside him, moving so that she was snuggled up to his side. He stiffened, going rigid all over, broadcasting as many “do not approach” signals as possible, all out of pure instinct and old habit. Slowly, though, sense leaked through and he relaxed by degrees into the touch before finally putting his arm around Shelby’s shoulders and turning his head so that his nose was buried for a moment in the coarse curls of her hair. Her hair smelled like lavender and soldered iron, comforting and quite familiar.

            “I am drunk,” Rimmer confided to her hair.

            “I know.”

            “Do you know what I think, though, about the Lump?”

            “No. What?”

            “Did you know that his smile is a pinball? No. Not the ball. The, hrm. The glowy bits. Pinball smile. Forty-thousand watts.”

            Shelby shifted, prodding Rimmer’s nose out of her hair so that she could better see the man’s dopey, half-lidded face. At least he wasn’t looking near tears, anymore. “Arnie,” she cautioned, uncertain if he was quite drunk enough for the specific question she had in mind, “Did you just say your roommate has a nice smile?”

            Rimmer snorted hard and rolled his eyes extra dramatically, pressing his fingertip against her nose with a faint “boop” sound that actually sounded exactly like a tiny horn. Arnold’s ability to mimic always surprised Shelby. He rarely did it, perhaps out of self-consciousness, but he was almost always right on the nose—no pun intended—when he did. He could even make a passing attempt at her own high tones. It was like a secret talent that he didn’t even realize he had. Rimmer was full of good things he didn’t seem able to acknowledge, in fact. It broke her heart, sometimes.

            “Arnold,” she pressed, feeling that this particular topic was important enough to warrant a bit of meddling, “Do you think Lister is attractive?”

            His face twisted into such an expression of complete disgust at the question that Shelby couldn’t help but giggle. “All right, okay, I’m sorry I asked. Never mind, then. It’s just a bit of a weird thing to say, you know. That’s the closest thing to anything approaching mushy romanticism I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth.”          

            “S’not romantic!” Rimmer insisted, going squeaky at the end, “It’s factual. His smile is a pinball. Your eyes are melted chocolate. I don’t see what the big, the big deal is.” He sniffed. Shelby rolled her eyes. She _hated_ that sniff. He’d done it much more when they’d first met and, she gathered, even more when he’d first arrived on campus. It was a sound of egotistical dismissal, like she was the dumbest, lowliest thing in the universe while Rimmer was king of the dicks. She tweaked his ear rather viciously, comforting herself for the bit of spite by taking into account the fact that Arnold was so plastered, by that point, that all he did in response to the brief pain was giggle hysterically and bat ineffectually at her fingers.

            “I love you,” he crooned at her, shifting around so that his head was suddenly in her lap and he was able to look up at her with wide, adoring eyes. She pinched his cheeks and kissed the tip of his nose.

            “Good. You ought to do, after all I’ve done for you. I love you, too, you git. Even if you do have truly questionable taste in men.”

            Rimmer frowned. “I am not…I do not. No. Stop it. M’not even gay. Probably. And you said if he…you said if…” he trailed off, looking confused. “Words are smegging bastards.”

            Shelby snickered. She had always much enjoyed Rimmer when he was well sloshed. All of his hang ups mellowed out—except the ones that were so engrained into him that he couldn’t possibly set them aside for fear of being somebody else entirely, anyway. He became more open, more affectionate, and more playful. He also, unfortunately, lost a lot of his inherent wit.

            Shelby was  gearing up to offering some sort of retort to Rimmer’s reminder that she had, in fact, said she’d kiss the Lump if only he were of the appropriate gender, when the club door abruptly opened and the topic of their discussion came striding out, lighting a fresh cigarette as we went.

            “Oh, ‘ey,” the man greeted, taking in the sight of Shelby sitting criss-cross on the sidewalk with Rimmer’s head in her lip. He frowned thoughtfully down at Rimmer, lowering his lighter away from the cig and tucking them both back into his jacket pockets. “Came out here to smoke without botherin’ people, but then here’s the people in question outside. I can’t do right, tonight,” Lister said, his tone friendly and teasing despite the complaint.

            “S’the Lump!” Rimmer shouted out in reply. He abruptly scrambled up to his feet, rushing Lister and throwing his arms around the man in a sort of half-embrace before sliding around to his side, leaving his arm looped over Lister’s shoulders in a comradely manner. From her place at their feet, Shelby gaped. She’d never seen Rimmer be so willingly affectionate with people other than herself, even when extremely tanked, as he currently was. It was completely worth the extra dollar-pounds the hard stuff had set her back to witness this moment.

            “The lump?” Lister questioned, apparently not too concerned one way or the other about having Rimmer slung all about his shoulders. Shelby reckoned he was used to hanging around people with a penchant for sloppy drunkenness. He did, however, seem quite concerned about the lump business, his eyes trailing up and down Rimmer’s taller frame as if seeking out some sort of bump on his person. When he found none, he gave Shelby the once over, as well, and ended up grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

            Shelby stuck out her tongue at him, “Hey, now, keep your eyes to yourself. Besides, you’ve got it wrong, mister. The lump he’s talking about is you.” There, that’d take some of the wind out of his sails. Wait. Oops. She shouldn’t have told on Rimmer, though. Damn that good alcohol to Jupiter and back.

            Rimmer was too drunk to care that he’d been tattled on, anyway. He gave Lister a bit of a shake and nodded excitedly. “Yes, absolutely. Positively. You are the Lump in my bunk, forever above my head, snoring away like a dragon that has swallowed a truck load of chainsaws and developed a nasty head cold. You are always there, always snoring, always filling the place with your smell. My own personal Lump.” Rimmer leaned in closer to Lister, lowering his voice to a confiding whisper, “To be quite honest, though, I think ‘Lister’ is an improvement.”

            Lister grinned and, for a moment, Shelby understood what Rimmer had meant with all of his sloshy ramblings about the man’s pinball smile. “Yes, well,” she said, going for prim and proper and managing more on the side of slurring and tipsy, “I am glad to see that you boys are bonding but I…I have an exam to sit through tomorrow, you know, and I have to get back. So, come on, Arnie.”

            Lister made an “oof” sound as Arnold collapsed a fair amount of his weight on the other man’s shoulder. “Whoopsies, my legs have turned off,” Arnold declared with rather inappropriate glee.

            “Eh, maybe I should give you both a hand back,” Lister hazarded, considering the two drunken wrecks before him. He himself was on the start of being nicely drunk, and that was enough to feel a good buzz but not so much that he couldn’t lead these silly people back where they belonged. The girl, Shelby, he trusted to look after herself all right, but Rimmer was so wet as to actually be a mug of ale, and he didn’t think it was fair to leave a lady with that kind of responsibility. This was especially true when said mug of ale was hanging off Lister, his legs lax and useless weight.

            Shelby nodded, “That’d be good, thanks.” She went around to Rimmer’s other side and slipped under his arm. He was far too tall for the gesture to mean much of anything as far as weight bearing was concerned, but Lister appreciated the show of support, regardless. The man, for all that he was a skinny, bony thing was awfully heavy.

            They walked back to campus together in a slow, careful shuffle. Lister and Shelby chatted amiably about the weather and Smeg and the Heads and even zero-gee football. The latter topic caused Lister to go on a tear about Jim Bexley Speed so enthusiastically punctuated by swooping hand gestures that he inadvertently managed to bash Rimmer in the nose with his palm. Luckily Arnold, who was sloppily singing an old Gershwin tune at the top of his lungs, didn’t seem harmed.

            Once they’d reached the dorms, Shelby and the boys parted ways, but not before Shelby gave into a rarely accepted temptation. She ran her fingers through Arnold’s curly hair, giggling gleefully at the soft springy texture and the way it stood out in all directions once she was done with it. Arnold, now more asleep than anything, grumbled dimly at her and nothing more. Shelby bid Lister a goodnight and went on.

            Lister made no secret of watching her go, that time. He whistled. “Man, she is something else,” he told Rimmer, approvingly.

            “S’gay. Stay off her,” Rimmer replied in a slur that still managed to sound impressively protective. Lister snorted good-naturedly.

            “Relax, guy. She’s a great girl, is all I’m saying. An’ you are heavy as smeg. Haven’t your legs turned back on, yet? I don’t want to have to drag you up these stairs.”

            Obligingly, Arnold scrambled around a bit until his knees were straight and his feet were firmly planted against the ground. It took several long minutes and a good deal of trial and error, granted, but eventually the two of them managed to make their way into their room. Lister helped Rimmer to crash land into the bottom bunk. The Scouser was panting softly, unused to such prolonged physical exertion or much exertion at all.

            “Do yeh want me to pull of your boots?”

            Rimmer groaned and wiggled about, turning himself from his stomach onto his back. He glanced down at his boots, having to shut one eye to bring the tatty, unpolished things into focus. “S’disgrace,” he mumbled, thinking of his father and how furious he would be to see his son in such a state.

            “What is? Does that mean you want to keep ‘em on?”

            “I want,” Rimmer replied, in a big breathy gust of air, throwing out his arms akimbo to accentuate his declaration, “to feel safe.” And then he promptly slipped into a heavy sleep. Lister sighed and moved to unlace the man’s boots. He’d never seen such well-tended boots in his life. There wasn’t a single hole to be seen in the soft leather, and the whole bloody shoe seemed to glow from within, it was so polished and clean. Lister couldn’t fathom what was so disgraceful about it, unless Rimmer had, in a drunken state of clarity, realized that wasting so much time on shoe care was prattish. As far as the man’s final statement went, Lister wasn’t too surprised. He’d heard a lot more personal confessions in the haze of drunkenness in his time. Hell, once even that idiot Dobbin had admitted that he actually desperately wanted to be a copper. People said weird, intimate things when they were soused. That was part of the appeal of drinking, as far as Lister could see. How else would anybody ever be truly open with anybody else?

            Lister pulled a shockingly clean blanket up over his roommate and kicked off his own heavy boots before pulling himself up onto his bunk. The gig that night had gone pretty well, and he was feeling a warm buzz of financial success—one hundred dollar-pounds split up between the three of ‘em!—as well as lager. He yawned jaw-poppingly wide and settled down amongst his trash heap nest. His snores filled the small room almost before he was even completely asleep.

            Passed out below the wheezing Lump, Rimmer huddled down into his blankets and smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

The most frustrating thing about drawing from memory, in Rimmer’s opinion, was how distracting it could be. Perched on the edge of an old lawn chair under the water-spotted dome of the Observation Deck, Arnold huffed in annoyance at the sketchbook resting on his knees. He’d spent the last half hour trying to accurately recall the swoop of the eyebrows of the cafeteria worker who’d handed him his breakfast that morning. Every line he tried seemed far too severe over the woman’s droopy, basset hound eyes. She wasn’t anyone special, he supposed. Her name was Bertha, according to her name badge. She probably didn’t even know him by name in return. He only saw her a few days a week, and never said much more than the trading of a polite greeting and an expression of thanks. Regardless, she always gave his lean frame a close once over as he approached, and he somehow always ended up with an extra rasher or two of bacon on his tray. Something about the small gesture caught his attention and made him desperate to capture her face in granite.

            His sketchbooks were full of people who had affected him in some small way, for better or worse. The only figures he refused to immortalize in his works any longer were his brothers and his parents; he’d gotten his fill of bringing their faces to light on his journey from Io to Earth. Four sketchbooks of his family’s collective disappointment and disgust were plenty enough for anyone.

            Arn growled lightly in his throat and attacked the woman’s eyebrows with the well-worn eraser balanced on the arm of the chair next to him.

            “Hey,” a familiar voice greeted. Arnold froze mid stroke, tensing. It was half past ten in the morning. What the smeg was the Lump—no, Lister, he reminded himself—doing up, let alone fully dressed and in Arnold’s personal haven?

            “Hello,” Rimmer managed, forcing himself to go back to concentrating on his sketch.

            Lister yawned loudly and stretched so hard his spine put off a succession of pops. He threw himself without ceremony into the aged chair beside Rimmer and looked up through the glass at the cloudy sky. It’d been raining on and off all morning. Rimmer enjoyed listening to the patter of the water droplets on the glass. Besides, it was safer under the dome than out in the storm. Recent attempts to head off acid rain had been relatively successful, but you still didn’t want to go out without a properly treated umbrella.

            “Don’t you have class?” Lister questioned, companionably.

            Rimmer made a noncommittal noise, shaking his head. Like most graduate level students, he only had a few hours of actual lectures a week. The rest of his time was spent fulfilling his duties as teacher’s assistant or spending his required studio hours in Rugger’s, coming and going as he pleased. Technically, he was still in the studio building, even if he wasn’t actually in a work room itself.

            “Oh. I do, I think. Not sure, I don’t go to my morning ones.”

            “I know,” Rimmer said, slowly. He was well aware of how blissfully his roommate slept the morning away. While he usually missed the waking up moment, Rimmer had long ago deduced that the man rose at about noon each day, managed to catch what few afternoon courses he had, and then immediately went off and spent the better part of his evening on the town before returning in the early morning hours to come and snore over Rimmer’s head. Lister’s sleeping schedule hadn’t altered one bit after that inadvisable night at the club. It’d been over a week since his roommate had pulled off his boots and tucked him in, and this was the first time Arnold had seen the other man outside of his bunk and awake. Frankly, Rimmer was glad that Lister didn’t seem to want to rehash that evening to any extent.

            “I was thinkin’ that maybe I should, though,” Lister replied, almost as Arnold hadn’t spoken at all. Arn had the sudden feeling that this was some sort of pre-prepared speech. “Thing is, I got a letter yesterday sayin’ that they’d put me on probation and I’d be expelled if I didn’ improve.”

            Arnold had long expected that was in the cards for his roommate. They were nearly three months into the term, by that point, and the university, while quite abiding, could only allow such truancy for so long. “Where will you go, then?” Arnold asked, because asking seemed the polite thing to do in such a conversation.

            Lister shook his head. “Nah, man. I’d thought I would, at first. Like, I wasn’t too upset about having to leave. Figured it was their fault for expecting a person to get up at such a smeggin’ awful early hour, you know. But then I started thinking about it more, an’, to be honest, I don’t want to be an artist.”

            “So…when are you leaving?” Arnold said, going for a different route, this time. He frowned a little, not understanding where the man was going with this. Clearly he was on his way out, right? Why did he keep blathering on?

            “I don’t want to be much of anything, though. So I might as well stay where I can get a good curry when I want it and sleep in a decent bed and go out with mates whenever I please, yeah? If all I got to do to keep that going is pull myself out of bed in the mornings, then, well, I guess that’s all right.”

            Rimmer idly penciled in the shape of Lister’s right eye at the bottom corner of his page. It was a nice, rounded shape with a hint of laugh lines at the corner. “So you’re staying,” he surmised, speaking slowly, mulling it over. Why was Lister telling him this? Was it some sort of misplaced roommate courtesy?

            “Well, yeah. But, the thing is, I was kind of hoping maybe you could help me out.”

            Arnold’s pencil went still on the page. “Oh?” he questioned, staring down at the thick paper with a frown of confusion forming.

            “You’re one of the upper classmen here, right? You know this place pretty well, an’ you probably know what a man has to do to keep his head above water an’ not get booted.”

            “I suppose so,” Arnold agreed, though he winced a bit at the thought of having to assist Lister in simply performing at the most mediocre possible level. It was Art College, for smeg’s sake, not the Space Corps. You did your work, you listened to lectures, you studied for a few exams. What was the big deal? “You want me to be your, uh, tutor, then?”

            “Sure, yeah, I s’pose. Kind of help me out on getting to classes and knowing what to do, is all. Help me study or something.”

            Arnold moved away from his blocked in sketch of Lister’s eye and went back to fighting with the cafeteria lady’s eyebrows. “What do I get in return?” he questioned, bluntly. He wasn’t about to take time away from his own strictly organized routine—he had the color-coded agendas to prove it—to help his slobby, lazy roommate out without some kind of compensation.

            “Oh, hey. I dunno. I don’t have that much cash or anythin’. I do get some free drinks at the club, though, for playing with the band. Don’t suppose you’d be interested in that?”

            Rimmer cast him a skeptical, side-long look and Lister sighed heavily, letting his shoulders sag in dejection. “Thought as much,” he agreed, faintly.

            “I tell you what,” Arnold said, unable to witness the forever-smiling, cheerful man in such a state of resigned depression. Besides, his suggestion was a good one, and it would serve his own ends extremely well. “I’ll help you keep up around here if you start making yourself and our room decent.”

            “Eh?” Lister questioned, clearly completely flummoxed as to what the man could possibly be referring to.

            Rimmer sighed, long suffering, and rolled his eyes domeward. “You’re a total slob, Lister,” he informed the man, patiently as he could. “Your bunk is filthy, and you make every part of the room you happen to inhabit equally disgusting. I’ve been cleaning up after you as much as possible since the start of term and, frankly, it would help me out a lot if you’d start doing it yourself. Some regular showers and a biweekly washing—make that weekly, actually—washing of your sheets and clothes would also not go amiss.”

            Lister stared at him blankly for a while. “You want me to be tidy?” he questioned, incredulous and perhaps more than a little annoyed.

            “If you want my help, you have to at least make an effort, yes,” Rimmer replied, firmly.

            They stared each other down for a long while. Arnold started to get that old nervous itch all over, half expecting that Lister was going to lash out at him somehow for even making the suggestion, let alone sticking to his guns like this. Indeed, when Lister finally broke eye contact and reached out, Arnold flinched bodily backwards and raised his hands slightly, expecting a hit.

            Confused, Lister let his offered hand fall a few inches. “S’deal, man,” he said, carefully, offering a handshake once more.

            Arnold, pushing his embarrassment aside, gripped the man’s wide, stubby-fingered hand in his own slimmer, paler one and gave it a firm shake. “The first thing,” he said, rubbing his palm briskly against his trousers to dispel the sudden grimy feeling he’d acquired, “is to wash your smegging hands. And not just rinse them a bit and smear your grime all over my towels, either. I mean a proper wash with soap and a nail brush.”

            “What’s a nail brush?” Lister asked, rather awed at the sheer idea.

            Rimmer smothered a groan as he neatly packed away his sketchbook and supplies into his satchel. Lister was definitely getting the better part of this bargain, so far.


	4. Chapter 4

Reconditioning Lister to behave like a proper human being proved to be more of a struggle than Arnold had anticipated. He was so used to his own careful, regimented tidiness that Lister’s all-over, casual slobbiness was impossible to predict or prevent. One minute Rimmer was instructing the man on the simple concept of throwing one’s dirty laundry into the hamper, and the next he had to stop and backtrack upon the realization that Lister only changed out of his clothes every fortnight, if that.

            “Well, first of all, that’s disgusting,” Arn said, as he had many times that day, “and secondly, you’re going to have to start changing your clothes every day.”

            “Every _day_?” Lister yelped, as if he’d never heard of such nonsense in his life. “All me clothes’ll get worn through if I wear ‘em like that.”

            Rimmer poked his finger through a fist-sized hole near the collar. “Lister,” he said, striving for patience, “They’re already getting worn out because you never wash or mend them.”

            “Nah, man. That’s for ventilation, you know. And when I wear my shirt a few days solid, it ends up with a nice layer of grime tha’ holds it all together, you know.”

            Arnold stared at the other man, aghast. How was it possible that anyone could not only be so mindlessly filthy but also so easily able to rationalize his habits like that? “Were you raised by wolves, by chance?”

            Lister laughed. It seemed like that was all he ever did in response to Arnold’s incredulous sarcasm. “No,” he assured, “I was raised by my gran and my da’. He wasn’t my real dad, though. M’adopted.”

            “Oh,” Rimmer said, slowly, mulling on that for a while. He’d often wanted to be adopted when he was younger. It was the only explanation for his complete inability to meet his parents’ expectations. Now, that didn’t matter so much, but the thought still held some appeal. His parents could have been anybody, after all, anyone he wanted. “Well, that’s no excuse. Didn’t your grandmother ever teach you how to clean up after yourself?”

            Lister smirked a bit and wiggled in his seat—Rimmer cringed to think of all the gunk and grime the man had to be leaving behind—and pulled a sticky, hard-used billfold from his back trouser pocket. He flicked a worn photosnap out and handed it over to Rimmer, who held it like it might explode. “Nah,” he answered, easily, “But she did teach me how ta knit and sew.”

            The figure in the photo appeared to be a densely built, overweight man with giant cigar in his mouth, tangled dreads in desperate need of tending, and an enormous straw hat with a tiny, stained plastic daisy in the equally grotty band. The man wore a shirt that might have once had bright geometric shapes but had long ago faded into a sort of pink-gray-brown color accented by aged and unidentifiable stains.

            “Who is it?” Rimmer questioned, confused.

            “That,” said Lister, “is my gran.”

            Arnold squinted at the photo and tilted his head a bit before handing the photo back and nodded. “Of course it is. That explains everything. Regardless, you need to change your smegging clothes. And once they are in the hamper, there they stay until wash day, all right?”

            “You’ve gotta be jokin’. I’ll be doing laundry constantly to keep up!”

            “About weekly, yes,” Rimmer agreed, without pity.

            “You’re a mean bastard,” Lister complained, getting up. “You want a drink?”

            Rimmer shook his head and went back to work on his pencils assignment while he waited for Lister to return. The piece wasn’t one of his best by far, but it would serve well enough once complete. He was trying to capture a specific landscape he had in mind, an old remembered view from back on Io. For all that he hated his time there and felt the moon to be full of nothing but bad memories, it had its own beauty, too. If nothing else, it was a damn sight cleaner than the planet-sized refuse dumb that was the planet Earth. Rimmer’s nostrils flared in concentration as he lightly shaded in a shadowy line of trees behind the glistening, stained glass gazebo in the foreground. It probably would require a little color work later on to make it shine, but only if he had the time to invest. Teaching Lister how to be clean was more of a drain on his schedule than he’d expected. His schedule, once packed in with studio time, had been chopped up and shuffled about for the sake of keeping Lister’s grades up to snuff, as well. In truth, all this meant was that his social calendar was something akin to normal for once, but to Rimmer it seemed like a lot of wasted hours.

            Lister returned with his lager. Rimmer had long ago given up trying to enforce the campus’s no-alcohol policies. Leopard lager was like ice water to Lister; convincing him to abstain while on school property would do nothing more than start a row. While they’d managed to keep things more or less civil between them, Arnold had found himself stumbling into several hot-button situations from time to time. The other man’s habits were infuriating. No amount of careful cloud visualization could quite keep Arnold’s snappish commentary completely in check. For the moment, however, things were calm and even somewhat friendly.

 Rimmer continued to progress on the pencil work—it was all  shading, at that stage, and didn’t take quite as much strict concentration as usual—as he continued that day’s lesson on  the finer points of hygiene and proper roommate etiquette.

            Somewhere along the way, however, their now familiar give and take about vacuuming and dryer sheets shifted into an actual conversation. And not just a few shared barbs or bits of small talk, either, but real personal anecdotes and chummy jokes.

            By the time Rimmer had finished the landscape piece, it was three hours later and he and Lister were still lost in conversation. For people who had absolutely nothing in common, they still found plenty to discuss. Sure, a lot of their ideals were in conflict—Rimmer had never encountered anyone so blissfully unaware of universal politics in his life, for example, and Lister had definitely never had such a long chat with someone so utterly lacking in even the basic concepts behind zero-gee football—but it was still pleasant and even quite enjoyable. Rimmer, who often spent one-on-one conversation in a frantic mental meltdown, desperate to not come off as a total gimboid, had barely worried at all. It didn’t seem to matter if he said something stupid or not, Lister always grinned and offered something stupid right back. Lister didn’t seem capable of judging anyone else, let alone finding them unworthy of his time or attention.

            Talking to Shelby was a bit like this, Rimmer had to admit. The difference was that Shelby often ended up guiding Rimmer down the rabbit hole of his neuroses much more often than she actually participated with him in an animated trading of ideas. Lister, while not at all afraid to let Rimmer speak his turn, was much more apt to jump in with his own wild take on things, pulling the direction of the conversation behind him like the tail of a comet.

            “I’m starvin’,” Lister announced right in the middle of some joke about a bear and a golf course. “You want to go get something?”

            Rimmer’s stomach growled, answering for him. He’d been especially busy that morning with tasks for Dr. Marco, and his plans to grab a sandwich before returning to the dorm had been thwarted by students demanding his attention with questions about an upcoming assignment. Then, of course, when he’d actually arrived in the dorm, Lister had been waiting for his lessons, and time had gotten away from them both.

            “Yes, then,” Lister said, amused. “Come on. I could do with a curry.”

            Rimmer stood up from his perch and stretched high, working out a few kinks in his lanky frame. “Lister, you _always_ ‘could do’ with a curry. It’s all you ever eat.”

            “That’s not true,” Lister argued as he reached across the lowest bunk and tossed Rimmer his favorite green windbreaker, “I like the odd poppadum, as well.”

            Rimmer nodded his thanks and scrambled into the discount coat. It fit all right around his body, and it was perfectly warm enough, but the sleeves were a good four inches too short. He could never wear the thing for any span of time without pulling every few minutes at his cuffs, intent to cover his bony wrists. He tugged at them even now, giving Lister a once over as he did so. True to form, despite all they’d gone over again and again, the smeggy git was digging through his clothes hamper for his own outerwear.

            “Leave off,” Rimmer said, sharply. He turned toward his drawers in their shared dresser and gingerly rifled through the contents. A moment later he emerged victorious with the desired article. It was a black, v-neck, cable-knit sweater. Obviously it was several sizes too big for Arnold himself; Rimmer had only bought the blasted thing on the off chance he might have to attend a cool-weather funeral. It’d been worth the four dollar-pounds, however, to witness the look of uncomprehending astonishment on Lister’s face as he tried to hand it over to him.

            “You can’t think I’m gonna wear that?” Lister questioned, brows raised high. Despite his words, his fingers curled into the thick knit of the sweater as Rimmer pushed it at him.

            “You most certainly are. All your things are too grotty. We’d better go down to the laundry tomorrow and sort that out. I don’t have much that’d fit you. And even if I did, I want as few of my clothes to touch you as possible,” he paused, “no offense.”

            Lister snorted, taking on a reedy, sarcastic lilt, “Oh, yeah, ‘course not.” He sighed at the mass of yarn in his grip, looking over at his jittery roommate. “Well?”

            “’Well’ what?” Arn replied, baffled. His leg was starting to bounce a bit, a sure sign that he was feeling anxious and antsy. Considering how rarely Rimmer was anything _but_ anxious and antsy, the habit was easy to spot.

            “Well turn around, man. Give a bloke some privacy, eh?”

            Arnold crossed his arms over his chest, rolling his eyes upward in exasperation. “Oh, honestly!” he groused, spinning around to face the wall. At least his leg had stopped twitching.

            Lister yanked his soiled t-shirt off and smashed it up into a makeshift ball before sending it flying with fair precision toward the waiting hamper. It landed on the edge but still made it mostly in. Mentally cheering at his victorious shot, Lister scrambled his way into the sweater. It was soft and warm, actually, and almost as comfortable as his favorite broken-in t-shirt, except for the fact that all of his favorite stains were missing, and it smelled flowery, like laundry solvent.

            “Are you decent? Git. Since when are you such a prude, anyway?” Rimmer grumbled at the wall, “Half of your morning routine involves sitting about in your knickers eating Krispies.”

            “I only thought I’d save you the trouble of getting’ in a snit about me stretching out your sweater,” Lister said. “I’m dressed.”

            Rimmer turned back around and assessed the other man. He gave a sharp nod. “You’re still a slobby git, but at least you won’t smell like fermented underpants. Not too much, anyway.”

            “Haha, funny. Are we gonna get some chow or what?”

            Together the boys trooped out of the dorm and across the quad to the student’s union, the smell of low quality, mass produced meals in the exhaust-thick air. Rimmer wondered, not for the first time, if the faint drizzle of rain falling down on them might actually be flammable.

            “D’you got any plans for the hols?” Lister asked as they walked, the question coming entirely out of the blue.

            The winter holiday break was a little less than a month away. Arnold hadn’t paid much attention to it. Other than the fact that it meant the end of the term—meaning there’d be finals to take and even more to grade—he’d not noticed its arrival at all, in fact. He hadn’t left campus for any academic break since he’d enrolled. Typically over the holidays he basked in the campus-wide solitude and, if he was feeling especially festive, swiped a bit of bread pudding from his dinner back to the dorm to eat while he read up on his classes for the upcoming semester. All of that was exactly the sort of thing Lister would make fun of him over, however. So, instead of explaining, Rimmer shrugged and said “No, not really. Do you?”

            Lister shook his head, “Nah. There’s nobody to go see. The Heads’ve gone on for however long, and all me mates I’ve made at uni are going to be going back home or off planet or some such. I don’t have a home to go back to, though, and I’m too skint to go out of the city, let alone off the whole planet.”

            “Have you ever been off planet before?” Rimmer questioned, honestly curious. A lot of the Earthlings he’d met had been other places, though not always too far off. Some had only been to the moon, in fact. Not that there was anything wrong with that. The lunar colonies were as decent a vacation spot as any; they certainly had an excellent view.

            Lister shook his head. “Nah. I’d thought about trying to hitchhike my way around, once, maybe even go to Mimas—they’ve got those wicked billboards, you know?—but I never did. Thought about getting in league with one of those Coca-cola ships, once, too, but I don’t care for the taste.”

            Rimmer snorted. “Lister, you drink madras sauce right out of the bottle.”

            “Yeah, so? I like a bit of zing from time to time. What’s the harm in that?”

            “Nothing, as long as no one has to smell your breath, afterward.”

            Lister breathed damply on the man in retort.

            “Ugh Lister. Smeg off,” Arnold said. Lister pressed closer, staying on Arnold with all of the dedication of a zero-gee defensive line, his pinball grin in place all the while. “Lister! Grow up!” Arnold shouted at the man, though the order lost some of its oomph as he started to laugh, pushing the panting man away from him while yelping mock-distress cries of “oh, ugh, gross, yuck!” as they trod together through the cafeteria doors with all the carefree merriment of schoolboys. Rimmer had never had the chance to be a carefree schoolboy, before. It was quite nice, even though Lister’s breath was most assuredly not.

            Shelby waved at them as they entered. Rimmer never got the chance to eat the dinner meal with others. Shelby and her friends always took up a whole table, and he was too self-conscious to try and find a place for himself at strangers’ tables. As a result, he usually took his meals quickly and alone. It wasn’t too much of a hardship. His parents had strictly forbid idle chatter at the dinner table, so he’d never quite gotten the hang of social eating.

            “Hey, there’s some of me drinking buddies!” Lister said, pointing.

            Rimmer wished he didn’t feel so surprised. “Oh, right,” he said, picking up a waiting tray. “Well, I’ll see you later, then.”

            “Eh?” Lister questioned, going for a tray of his own and following right at Arnold’s heels, despite the fact that Rimmer was headed toward the salad bar, and Lister wouldn’t even so much as look at something fresh and leafy, let alone eat it. “Don’t you want to sit together?”

            Arnold laid a few lettuce leaves on his tray, arranging them in a precise and fussy manner that, no matter how hard he’d tried, he couldn’t seem to shake off. “Well, yes, I suppose. But don’t you want to sit with your...friends?”

            Lister ignored the deliberate hesitation and the decidedly unimpressed tone Rimmer put on the final word. “Yeah, I do. An’ you ought to come with.”

            Arn blinked, his mind going on a temporary vacation while it all came together. “Oh.”

            “Yeah, ‘oh.’ Don’t worry, guy. They don’t bite or anything. They’ll probably even like you, if you give ‘em half a chance. And if you don’t talk too much.”

            Rimmer focused his attention on arranging carrots in straight, soldierly lines on his plate while Lister went to collect his customary curry with extra sauce. Rimmer was still arranging vegetables when the other man returned, plate in hand. Lister, to his credit, allowed several long moments of silence to pass between them before he said, with a sigh, “Come on, Arn. I want my mates to know each other, yeah?”

            Arnold stopped toying with his food. He looked up at Lister, his face unusually open, expressing intense surprise. “Mates? Me? A mate? Yours?” he fumbled, eyes wide, mouth slightly agape.

            “Well, yeah. Of course. I’m your friend, too, aren’t I?”

            Rimmer was even more startled to realize that, yes, actually, over the last several weeks he had indeed come to consider his scummy roommate in almost the same category as Shelby Travers. Friends. Arnold had made a friend. Now he had _two_ of them. It was honestly more than he ever had dreamed. He chose, in that moment, not to dwell on how truly pathetic a victory it was; he was going to savor this success while it lasted, thank you very smegging much.

            “Yes,” he said, decisively. “We’re friends. Mates. Pals. Buddies. Chums.”

            Lister patted Rimmer on the shoulder warily, “S’all right with you, maybe we could be one of those things at a time. Sort of makes my head hurt, otherwise.”

            “Right-o, Skipper,” Rimmer said, falling into his Ace words out of sheer pleasure.

            “Yeah, don’t do that, either.”

            “Okay,” Arnold agreed, readily. Feeling like he was walking on air, he followed Lister out of the kitchens and out to the dining area to the table where Lister’s drinking buddies waited.

            Lister straddled his chair backwards and started tucking in halfway through greeting his mates. He pointed to each person around the table, throwing out their names in between large bites of vindaloo. “That’s Keyser, Alicia, Twix, and the Barley twins. Don’t ask me what their names are; you’d  get ‘em confused, anyway, like me. Everybody, this is Rimmer. He’s me roommate.”

            “What, the prat with the towels?” the one called Twix questioned, with cheery interest. Rimmer couldn’t place the student’s gender right off, confused as he was by the student’s wide shoulders and strong, masculine jaw, but xe was almost as tall as he was and sporting the longest, wildest mane of carefully curled ginger locks he’d ever seen. Xe reached out to shake Arnold’s hand, the many bracelets on xir wrist tinkling pleasantly with the motion. Arnold could tell right off that they were hand-crafted. There were quite a lot of students working in metals, this term. Lister himself had shown some interest and aptitude in the media, which Rimmer encouraged heartily. Shelby often worked with bronzes and smaller scrap sculptures. Arnold liked the idea of Shelby and Lister working together, as Lister had desired to introduce him to all of his friends in turn.

            “I like ironing,” Arnold said to Twix, lowering his voice into something warm and confiding. Twix’s smile doubled in size in response and xe gave Arnold’s hand a little extra squeeze before letting go.

            “You ought to hire yourself out, then,” the girl, Alicia, said before blowing an enormous bubble with her bright pink gum, “I hate the ironin’.”

            “Since when do you iron anything?” the bloke in the hat, Keyser, demanded. Rimmer suspected that the two of them might be an item. They sat quite close to each other, and something about the oncoming squabble was knowing and affectionate.

            “I don’t,” Alicia said, “because I hate it.”

            “Hate the washing up, too, you do,” Keyser accused.

            “That’s ‘cos I’m the one doing all the cooking, Cupcake.”

            Keyser indicated the cafeteria with two wide-flung arms, “What, here?”

            Alicia grinned, her expression delightfully smug.

            “Oi, Rimsey,” one of the Barley twins piped up. Rimmer could detect a definite Martian twang to his accent, “You only gonna eat that rabbit food?”

            Arnold looked down at his so-far neglected plate of greens and shrugged, “I’d planned on it, yes.”

            “He’s got the ears for rabbiting, at least,” the other twin said, dryly.

            Arn grimaced lightly and resisted the urge to run his fingers over the outline of his ears. People—well, his brothers—often had negative things to say about his giant ears. And his weak chin. And his enormous nostrils. And his Brillo Pad hair. Even so, having it so casually thrown out there, especially from a total stranger, caused a bit of extra sting.

            “Hey, now. Leave off, a’right?” Lister said, utterly calm and without a trace of animosity. To Rimmer’s surprise, the twins sat back a bit and the one who’d made the crack about his ears offered up an immediate and, for all that Rimmer could tell, completely sincere apology.

            Arnold was baffled. How on earth did Lister, of all people, command such easy respect and loyalty? He was a dirty bum, after all, no matter how decent hearted he might be. Still, everyone at the table clearly thought highly of him and, it seemed, respected his opinion. Lister vouched for Rimmer, and that made Rimmer one of the pack, cracks about his features and choice of repast notwithstanding.

            After Lister’s admonishment, the group seemed to collectively decide that picking on Arnold was a pastime not to be courted. Instead, Keyser leaned back a bit on his chair and started in on an elaborate anecdote about his first life drawing experience. “He was this teeny, tiny thing! He was more wrinkle than man, I tell you. Later on, I asked the prof’ how old he was and she said the blighther was one-hundred and fifteen! Can you imagine? A body of that age tottering all the way out here and then standing in that pose for the whole period, not even flinching once. I tell you, it was an _honor_ to capture the bastard on paper, it was.”

            Rimmer listened with half of his attention, committing the rest of it to working his way methodically through his meal. First, he pulled the lettuce leaves free from the rest of the vegetables. Then, with the tongs of his fork he captured the edge of the leaf and painstakingly rolled it up into a tight cylinder, which he then folded over and over again until the lettuce was reduced to a small, green, veiny square. Then he speared the square right through its middle and poked the fork through a tiny cherry tomato, careful not to squish it and make a mess. Once the tomato was secure, he held a cucumber slice against his plate with the partially loaded fork and cut the rounded portion into two almost equal halves. Once cut, he pressed one half up snuggly against the tomato. Finally, he scooped the tiniest amount of cottage cheese up on the remaining free space on the tongs and ate the whole lot in one bite, chewing slowly for quite a long while before finally swallowing it down.

            Alicia, having heard Keyser’s story many times before, found her attention drawn to Arnold’s habits. She stared with wide, curious eyes throughout the entire routine, hardly realizing as Arn finally swallowed that she’d been holding her breath in anticipation. She almost wanted to applaud. What a strange man.

            Thankfully, Rimmer was too fixated on eating to notice that he had an audience. Alicia’s baffled stare would have been bad enough. The man would have been even more mortified to know that Dave Lister was also taking in the show, his expression torn between bemusement something softer and harder to place.

            Rimmer finished his meal about the time the stories at the table were beginning to run dry.

            “Rimmer ought to tell us something,” Alicia pressed, intent to learn more about this weird bloke, “’cos he’s new and all.”

            “Oh, I, well. I don’t have anything interesting to share,” Arn babbled, going a bit pink. He’d never been good under pressure, especially with so many expectant eyes upon him. He was also still feeling especially conscious of his elephant-sized ears, which were burning under the scrutiny.

            “Never mind a story, then,” Alicia said, “Tell us more about you. Where are you from? Not Earth, I take it. You talk way too posh.”

            Arn cleared his throat nervously, deciding it was best to be honest and concise and try not to overthink it. He wished he had something on his plate, still. He’d give anything for one or two squishy tomatoes to roll about absently on his plate. When he was much younger, he used to carry around a rabbit foot keychain for the express purpose of fiddling. He’d found the token on the side of the road one day while looking for interestingly colored stones. Whenever he’d felt anxious, he’d simply put his hand in his pocket and stroke the soft, knobby toes of the thing until his worries subsided. The trick worked pretty well for him until a prefect had caught him with his hands in his pants during class and had wrongly assumed he was up to something dirty. Rimmer had been forced to meet with the headmaster, that day, and his rabbit foot had been confiscated. Mummy had been extremely cross when the school had called. Even years later Rimmer wasn’t entirely sure what had upset her more, the assumption that he’d been wanking at his desk or the fact he’d been carrying that filthy rabbit’s foot around all that time and, worse yet, taking comfort from it.

            “Rimmer?” Lister said, bringing Rimmer back to his present, and more pressing, humiliation.

            “No, I’m not from Earth,” Arnold agreed. “I’m from Io, actually.”

            One of the Barley twins whistled lowly, “Yowza! Imagine that, a fancy Io boy coming all the way to Earth. What, did you get thrown off the planet or something? Are you on the ‘lamb’? Did you kill someone?”

            “W-what?” Arnold choked out, startled by the barrage of increasingly odd and terrifying questions. The fact that the man leaned more and more into Arn’s personal space with each query also didn’t help matters.

            “Stop it, Eustace,” Twix snapped at the twin in question, twisting xir lacquered fingers in the man’s sleek black hair and pulling him roughly back into his seat. Xe offered Arnold an apologetic smile. “Please excuse the twins. They’re both complete bastarding gits and the only reason we tolerate them is because they’re good to buy a few rounds a week.”

            “Hey!” the twins protested in chorus, the one called Eustace rubbing at his abused scalp with a rueful expression.

            “I’ve heard Io has simulated seasons. Is that true?” Alicia asked politely, clearly trying to steer the conversation into something a little less insane.

            Arnold nodded, “Yes. Io is a moon, and it doesn’t have any atmosphere of its own. All the cities are under big, clear domes.”

            “I bet the stars are beautiful,” Alicia sighed, rather dreamily.

            Arn nodded again, with more vigor. “Yes. They are. That’s the thing I miss the most, being here, I think. You can’t see a star for anything, with all the smog.”

            “Aw, who needs stars, anyway?” the twin that wasn’t Eustace said, “A lot of sparkly lights in a bunch of boring darkness. Hell, if you’re so keen on it, you can always spatter some glow and the dark paint on the wall. Instant stars.”

            Arn raised his eyebrows slightly in consideration. “That’s a good idea, actually,” he said, warming to it. He glanced across the table at Lister, head tilted in query. “Our room could use with a little personal touch, don’t you think?”

          “Uni rules say no wall paint,” Lister replied, to see how Rimmer would react when reminded of his precious rules and regulations.

            Rimmer shrugged. “We’ll paint over it before we move out.”

            Lister grinned, “You wanna put a bunch of spatter paint all over everything? That’s not    tidy of you.”

            Arnold shook his head slightly, “No, git. I’ll do it properly. I’ve got tons of star charts. I’ll put up the paint in a scale-accurate mural on the ceiling.”

            The twin who’d suggested the idea made a raspberry noise, unimpressed, “You took something totally wicked and made it boring, egghead.”

            Rimmer shrugged. As far as he was concerned, that was the best way to approach art, anyway. What good was bringing beauty into an ugly world if you weren’t willing to be precise and reverent about it?

            Lister’s pinball smile was almost blinding as he considered the possibilities for the murals Rimmer might create. “Brutal,” he approved. “Absolutely bru-tahhl!”


	5. Chapter 5

Rimmer was balanced precariously on the headboard of Lister’s bunk, bare toes curled against the lacquered wood and his arches aching, when he first heard the faint but unmistakable mewling of a small feline. He pin-wheeled in the air for a moment before bracing his palms against a clear space on the ceiling above him. Panting faintly, his adrenaline up from his near fall, Rimmer’s eyes scanned over their remarkably tidy room. He couldn’t see anything suspicious, and for a moment he thought he’d imagined the noise. But then he heard it again, that plaintive meow.

            “Lister!” Arnold roared.

            “Somethin’ the matter?” Lister replied, casual as anything. He padded out from the bathroom, a towel slung over his bare shoulders, his trousers low on his hips, his braids dripping steadily. He looked up at Arnold, his gaze going past the carefully balancing man to the partially painted ceiling beyond. “Looking good. You’re not stuck again, are you? ‘Cos I don’t think me back has quite gotten over the last time.”

            Rimmer sniffed. He was not pleased to have that particular situation brought up again. So he had a slight problem with heights. That was hardly a monumental fault, was it? Still, having to have Lister bodily pull his paralyzed form off the headboard and back to the safety of the ground had been quite humiliating. Losing his balance and landing heavily on top of his roommate had added injury to insult. “No, I’m not stuck, you git. Don’t you hear it?”

            “‘It’?”

            “There it is again! That meowing. I think there’s a cat in here.”

            Understanding eased the lines of Lister’s face, pulling his lips into a smile. “Oh, that. Yeah, I know.”

            “What do you mean ‘yeah, I know’?” Rimmer questioned, just barely slipping into Lister’s accent as he repeated the man.

            Lister made a ‘hang on’ gesture and disappeared from Rimmer’s line of sight for a moment as the man scrambled under Rimmer’s bunk. A short time later, he staggered back into view with a large black cat clutched protectively to his bare, damp chest. The cat looked resigned to it, though his tail flicked warningly when he noticed Rimmer towering above.

            “Lister,” Rimmer said, forcing his tone to remain neutral, “That’s a cat.”

            “Yeah, I know. I said so, didn’t I?”

            “Why is there a cat in our room?”

            Lister blinked, frowning a bit as he considered the question. The better question, as far as he was concerned, was why _wouldn’t_ there be a cat in their room? Cats were great, and this particular cat was an especial beaut.

            “‘Cos it’s cold out, of course.”

            Rimmer gritted his teeth and eased his hand slowly away from the ceiling, easing himself off the headboard and down to Lister’s mattress. He staggered a bit, unaccustomed to trodding on the squishy, flexible surface. He hopped slightly, coming down to land on his bum on the mattress. He bounced a few seconds with the momentum, frowning down at Lister and cat in consternation all the while. “Did you grab that thing up off the street?”

            “Yeah, but he’s a good, clean cat. Honest. He’s my friend, you see. He hangs out around the student’s union, beggin’ for food. Me and the gang give him scraps and pet on him a bit, most days. But last night it was all snowing and that, you know. He’s much happier inside.”

            Rimmer stared at the cat skeptically, “Yes, I bet he is.”

            “Whatsamatter, Rimmer? Don’t you like kitties?”

            “Not particularly,” Arnold hedged. He didn’t care for most animals, to be honest. His parents had had no tolerance whatsoever for pets. There’d been a giant, angry dog in the neighbors’ yard, however. It had always barked and snarled at Rimmer when he went out. His brothers used to loosen its lead on boring summer days to watch Arnold screech and cry when the dog lunged forward, inches away from the boy’s vulnerable legs where whole meters of space should have been left open, safe, and free. Cats, comparatively, hadn’t caused him any direct harm. But they had a shifty look about them, as if they would happily do so given half the chance. “You can’t keep it here. It’s against the rules to keep animals in the dormitories.”

            “Keyser’s got a guinea pig in a ball in his room,” Lister argued.

            Rimmer had met the guinea pig in question. It was the saddest looking rodent he’d ever seen in his life, and Mummy used to make him clean out the rat traps back home. “We don’t have any place for it,” he said, going for a more rational approach. Lister didn’t respond well to reminders of regulations. “It needs room to...do whatever cats do. It needs things. Food and toys and all that stuff, not to mention a sand box. Where’s it been doing its business this whole day?”

            Lister blinked, clearly having not thought about that at all. He shrugged, “Dunno. He’s a smart cat. Maybe he knows how to use the loo.”

            Rimmer sighed and scooted over to the bunk ladder, climbing with precise care back down to the safety of the carpeted floor. He took care not to stand too close to Lister and the slowly bristling feline. He knew the little monster was going to hate him. This whole crazy scheme of Lister’s was going to end in blood and tears, and there was no need to bet that it would all be at Rimmer’s expense.

            “You’re not going to listen to me, are you?”

            Lister smirked, his eyes crinkling somewhat with the expression. “Nah, probably not.”

            “Then we better get going. It’s going to take some serious ingenuity to acquire cheap kitty litter, I’m sure. Do you think he’d put up with leftover cold casserole for a bit? I’m pretty sure I can get us access to the kitchens off hours, but that’s all they’ll have ‘til dinner tomorrow.”

            Lister watched, a bit flummoxed, as Rimmer bustled about the room, gathering up his windbreaker and his hole-ridden gloves and the slightly misshapen knit cap that Shelby had given him as an early holiday gift. “You’re gonna let it go, then? Gonna help me take care of him and all?”

            Rimmer tsk’ed quietly, Lister having distracted him from the rapid-fire list of necessities he was compiling in his head. They’d need to get their hands on some cat food--dry, not the wet stuff--and there was a possibility that one of the old storage tubs for oils in Dr. Marco’s office could be modified into a litter box. One of Rimmer’s chipped tea cups could serve as a water bowl, for the time being, and Shelby would likely be more than willing to whip up a few velvet mice for playing with. “It wouldn’t be the maddest thing you’ve dragged me into.”

            Lister’s pinball smile was on full power, splitting his gerbil face right in two. He gave the cat a bit of a parting squeeze and set the animal down on the floor before rushing over to their closet and wiggling into his new coat. Rimmer couldn’t bring himself to regret the pretty penny the heavy, fresh-smelling fur-lined leather jacket had cost him. Lister looked good in it. Besides, it wasn’t in the spirit of the holiday to be frugal.

            “You’re a real decent guy, Arn,” Lister praised.

            Rimmer’s face went hot and prickling with self-conscious embarrassment. He’d never gotten used to people complimenting him, even though Shelby had been at it for the last few years. Somehow, praise from Lister was especially affecting, the stupid, soft-hearted ninny.

            “Oh, for......get a move on, will you? I don’t want to get caught.”

            Leaving the furry menace behind, Lister made their way out of the doors and across the quad toward the cafeteria. Lister trudged on with no especial care while Rimmer felt tense and anxious at the prospect of being caught out. He was practically sneaking about on his toes. As far as he could remember from the student handbook, being caught harboring an animal in one’s rooms was a moderate offense that could lead to anything from a mild reprimand to losing the roof over one’s head. He’d rather not take the chance either way.

            “Does the mangy thing have a name?” Rimmer questioned Lister, desperate to distract himself from the growing knot of worry in his guts.

            Lister nodded. “Yeah. Cat.”

            “You named the cat Cat? Are you sure you have the creativity required for art college, Listy?”

            Lister grinned. “I tried some other names, first, but Cat is the only thing he’ll answer to. I can’t help it if he’s got strong feelings about stickin’ to the classics.”

            “Cat the cat,” Rimmer said, shaking his head ruefully. “Honestly.”

            “S’not so bad. Besides, what would you call him, since you’ve got such strong opinions on the matter?”

            “I don’t know,” Rimmer admitted, “I never had a pet as a kid. But I’d go for something strong and recognizable, I suppose. Like…like Napoleon.”

            “What, that short French ponce who got Waterloo’ed?” Lister questioned, eyebrows raising up.

            “Yes. That’s the one.”

            “But _why_?”

            Rimmer shrugged. “I don’t know. I always thought he was sort of interesting, that’s all.”

            “Rimmer, don’t take this the wrong way or anythin’, but sometimes I don’t know why I like you.”

            Arnold snorted. “Believe me, the feeling is mutual, you grotty bum.”

            Lister plucked at the perfectly folded collar of his coat, “Not so grotty, lately.”

            “True,” Arn conceded, “but you’re still a bum, you bum.”

            “A’right, yer Emperorness. Cool your croissant.”

            Arnold hushed the other man as they approached the side entrance of the kitchens. “Stay here a moment,” he ordered, opening the door and slipping in on his toes.

            Lister rolled his eyes at all the Mission Impossible business, but did as told. He leaned against the warm wall of the building and lit up his first cigarette in ages, sucking it in hungrily. Ah, that was the stuff.

            Arnold crept into the dimly lit kitchens, calling out softly. “Bertha? Hello?”

            “Is that young Arnold?” a voice replied, warm and matronly. Arn relaxed, pleased that his gamble had played out well. None of the other kitchen folks would have been so tolerant. Bertha had always been good to him, though, putting extra bits of food on his tray since his fresher year. It was only recently, since Lister and Arnold had starting spending so much time together on Lister’s lessons, that Bertha and he had gotten on friendly terms. All of that time with Lister meant less time than usual for meals between his heavy course load and involved work schedule. As such, he’d started skipping them.

            Bertha, noticing he was getting exceptionally lean, had pulled him aside in the middle of an especially frantic sandwich break to offer him open access to the kitchens. “Long as I’m about, lad, you can come right in and I’ll find you something to take with you, all right?” Startled by this show of generosity, but also ravenously hungry at the time, he’d agreed.

            Since then, he’d been popping in and out on Bertha’s kitchen at odd hours several times a day, grabbing up a cold cut sandwich or a few oranges to take with him to the studio or to munch on while his students did busy work during class.

            “Yes, it’s me,” Arn replied, offering Bertha a smile as she came into sight, a carefully wrapped tin of casserole already in hand.

            Her impossible-to-capture eyebrows were raised high over her droopy brown eyes. “I hadn’t thought to see you again so soon, pet.”

            “Ah, well. You know how it is. The cold always gives me an appetite. You don’t mind, do you?”

            Bertha patted his arm lightly, handing the warm foil tray over. “Not a bit. Otherwise it goes into the garbage, you know. Someone’s gotta eat what’s left. Better you than those damn stray cats.”

            Rimmer wisely decided not to say anything to that. He thanked her, as always, for her assistance and wished her a happy holiday before bustling back out into the cold. Lister whistled appreciatively to see how he’d made out. He wasn’t aware of Rimmer’s connections in the kitchens, and, honestly, Arnold wasn’t quite willing to open up about it. It was his secret with Bertha, a woman who reminded him not of his own mother but of what mothers should be.

“I didn’t think you had that kinda thing in you,” Lister said, apparently assuming Rimmer had performed a feat of sublime burglary.

“Oh, well. It was nothing,” Rimmer lied, intensely aware of the way his lips twisted into the half smile they always adopted when he wasn’t telling the truth. Strangely enough, it’d been quite a long time since he’d pulled that particular expression. He didn’t outright lie much, anymore.

“Brutal,” Lister explained, brightly. Clearly the prospect of being assisted in his illegal cat harboring was a heartening experience for the man. Rimmer had to admit he was feeling a little tingly about it, himself. It was almost fun, breaking the rules like this. It helped, of course, that he had a partner in crime. The camaraderie appealed to some neglected bit deep down in his soul.

“You want me to carry tha’?” Lister questioned as Arnold struggled to grasp the tray in one hand and pull his too-short sleeves down over his wrists with the other.

Arn, hardly aware he’d been fiddling so, shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ve got it now.” They walked on toward Dr. Marco’s office, Arnold leading the way and concentrating hard on not tugging at his cuffs again.

Rimmer’s key got them in and out in a trice, and soon they were trooping, side by side, toward the downtown market in hopes of scrounging up some litter. I was, quite possibly, the most truly domestic Rimmer had ever felt in his life. _Me, Lister, and the cat,_ he thought, dryly. Mummy would foam at the mouth in rage to think of it, no doubt. Somehow, that realization made the prospect of pet ownership much more fun.

It was fairly late by the time the duo trudged back to their room, arms loaded down with kitty things, their faces prickling and reddened from the chill. Lister tossed his bundles—they’d wrapped them up carefully in Rimmer’s windbreaker in the hopes of distracting any suspicious prefects—on his bunk and started calling for the Cat.

Rimmer set his own items, including the now cold casserole, on his desk and set about scrapping some of the cheese-and-chicken mess onto a paper plate for the by now surely starving feline. He then made his way toward the bath, desperate for a warm shower to thaw out his frozen extremities while Lister set up the rest of the kitty things, already in the process of stashing the filled litter tray on a corner behind Rimmer’s camphor wood chest.

When he padded back out of the bathroom a while later, dressed in a color coordinated pajama set and toweling at his hair, he found Cat hunkered over the casserole, wolfing it down in gulps. Lister lay beside the animal, sprawled out on his stomach with his chin in his hands as he watched with clear adoration. “I’m gonna eat you little chickie,” the Scouser sang in a scratchy undertone, “I’m gonna eat you little chickie. I’m gonna eat you little chickie, ‘cos I like to eat chicks!”

“You’re a complete prat,” Arnold informed the other man, primly.

Lister grinned up at him, “You’re jealous ‘cos of me mad lyrical skills, man.”

“Ah, yes. Who could forget the rhyming genius inherent in the Om song? Ommmm, ommmm, ommmm.”

Lister picked out a largeish chunk of chicken from Cat’s plate and threw it at Arnold’s face. “Shut your gob, Io-boy. Nobody asked you for your opinion, did they?”

Arn grimaced, wiping the chicken and sauce from his face and flicking it back into the cat’s bowl. In ordinary circumstances, he probably would have been livid at the mess and the disrespect to his person. As it was, he found it rather difficult not to laugh. Schooling his twitching lips, he sauntered regally over to his bunk and made a point to step on top of Lister, his foot digging into the man’s shoulder blades, on his way.

“Oof! Oi! Rude!”

“Stop smegging about with the flea-bag, Lister. You’ve got a final examination at eight sharp tomorrow, you know, and I refuse to have to resort to the cold water over the head trick again. It was a nightmare getting your sheets dry after.”

Lister groaned and grumbled but obligingly scrambled onto his feet and, after petting the Cat a few times, clambered up into the top bunk. “One more week of the daily slog an’ then it’ll be the hols,” Lister mused as he wiggled and snuggled down into his nest of blankets. Even after teaching the man to keep his bunk tidy and his bed clothes clean, Lister still piled all of his pillows up in odd towers and always woke up with his sheets tangled about his legs. “You sure you’re a’right, me hanging about with you all break?”

“You ‘hang about’ with me all the time now, anyway. What difference does it make?” Arnold asked, directing his question to the plank bottom of Lister’s bunk over his head. He reached out from the warm cocoon of his comforter and clapped his hands sharply three times, throwing the room into darkness. The ceiling wasn’t done, yet, and therefore offered no extra glow.

Lister was quiet a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “Doesn’t sound like you _want_ to spend the holiday together. If you don’t, that’s all right. I can always go ahead and go to Alicia’s mum’s place with Keyser. They offered it, after all, and wouldn’t mind a last minute addition to help pay for the petrol.”

“Alicia’s mom lives at the lunar base, doesn’t she?”

“Yeah, she does.”

“You want to spend Christmas on the moon?” Arnold asked, carefully neutral. He didn’t   want Lister to go, but he could also see how spending the holiday in the clean, clear, simulated atmosphere of Luna One would be preferable to hunkering down in their chilly dorm room, watching the Christmas Eve snow fall come down in smog blackened clods.

“Not  . I …I know you like your alone time. An’ I know I’ve kinda been in your hair, lately, what with all the revising that needed doing and that.”

“I don’t mind helping you study,” Arnold argued, rather defensively. In truth, he took great enjoyment from their revision sessions. Lister wasn’t dumb so much as under educated and a little lazy. Once his interest had been snagged and the basics had been covered, he soaked up information like a sponge. Going over his texts for metalworking had been an especially fun and exciting evening. Lister was a whiz bang with metal bits and wire and all of that. He far excelled Arn’s own ability in that area, in fact. Long after they’d covered the theory needed for Lister’s exam, the Scouser had returned from the reference library with his electronic book loaded full up on books about robotics and engineering in addition to the more advanced concepts behind making scrap art. Even now, the bits and pieces required for a self-directing soda-can robot sat on Lister’s worktable, half-compiled and ready to be eagerly finished up. Sometimes it was difficult for Rimmer to reconcile this motivated, intelligent, reasonably clean man with the motionless, gormless Lump who had once occupied space with him.

“No, I know you don’t. S’…I don’t know. I wish you’d tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Whether or not you actually want me around.”

Arnold felt a pained kick in his chest. It was like the beginning stages of his psychosomatic asthma attacks, his lungs going tight and his heart pounding into overdrive. “Of course I do, you smeggy, scrummy, half-witted Scouser bastard,” Arnold said, snappish and tense.

The bunk shook as Lister shifted about and leaned his body over the edge of his bunk, the shadowy outline of his head coming into view from above. Rimmer yelped as a pillow flew from Lister’s grasp and smacked him hard in the face. “Then I’ll stay here and have a jolly Christmas with you, you pompous, anal, priggish smeghead. And a happy new year, as well. Git. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Listy,” Arn replied, fighting a yawn.

Arnold refused to return the man’s pillow. He had plenty of others, anyway, but it was the principle of the thing. Arn pulled the pillow to his chest and embraced it, hugging hard once Lister’s gerbil-cheeked face was out of sight once more. Rimmer, once he was sure the coast was clear and the problem of the holidays was firmly settled, pressed his face into the cool cotton pillow case and took a deep breath in. Despite his more regular showering and more dedicated laundry habits, Lister still had a distinct, if now not unpleasant, scent. The pillow was rich with the odors of stale tobacco and heady lager, a musky scent of woody aftershave woven throughout with the smells of engine grease and iron recent and improving additions to the overall perfume.

It was only as Lister started his usual guttural, hoover-with-a-penny-in-its-bag snores that Rimmer began to drift slowly into a deep, comfortable sleep. As he teetered on the edge of oblivion, Arnold realized that savoring the unique scent of his roomate’s pillow was not exactly the most platonic of behavior.

 _Oh, smeg_ , Arnold thought, and then he was asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

Shelby loved Cat and, in return, Cat tolerated Shelby. Cat tolerated Shelby, adored Lister—for as much as a cat can be said to adore anyone—and Cat hated, with a fire-y, spitting, clawing passion one Arnold Judas Rimmer.

            “Try not to take it personally,” Shelby soothed. It was the first full day of the holiday, and Arnold was lurking around self-consciously in Shelby’s dorm room, watching her finish packing. Thankfully, most of the rest of the girls were long gone already, so there was no one around to giggle at him behind his back. Even so, it was difficult not to feel like an especial dunce when one’s face looked like one had had an especially affectionate run in with Edward Scissorhands. Cat’s claws were like tiny machetes, and Arnold’s innocent cheeks were his favorite target of choice. The first time it’d happened, Lister had laughed and scooped the cat up, scolding him lightly while Arnold prodded at the shallow cut on his chin and cursed under his breath. The second time, Lister had thrown a few sharp words at the cat and offered Arnold a few plasters for his earlobe. The third time, Lister had chased the cat right under the bed and had helpfully held a cleanish hand towel to Arnold’s gushing forehead all the way to the infirmary.

            The fourth time, Arn had ducked. And then he’d screamed bloody murder at Lister about his stupid, murderous, demon-spawned cat and clomped his way all the way to Shelby’s room without pausing in his litany of curses and blasphemies.

            Two cups of tea and a sit down later, he was reasonably more quiet, but no less calm.

            “I look like a bloody Deadie,” Rimmer hissed, poking at the h-shaped set of scars on his forehead, a little crooked between his eyes.

            Shelby threw a wadded up ball of socks at him. “Shut up, smeghead. My aunt’s first husband is a hologram, I’ll have you know. He’s head engineer on a freighter. My aunt misses him, but the company won’t let her send him any letters because he’s still technically dead. It’s sad.”

            Rimmer grimaced, now more in apology than in pain or annoyance. “Sorry,” he mumbled at his reflection in the borrowed hand mirror. Old prejudices died hard, and the flack against holograms and their struggle for civil rights were hot button points of contention, even outside of Io. One would be hard pressed to encounter any homophobic, sexist, or racist bigots anywhere in the universe—save some places in Io and others like it—but deadists were all around and extremely outspoken. Arnold had neglected to realize that Shelby would never be so close-minded or cruel as to treat anyone who was dead as anything other than human and worthy of her respect.

            “It’s all right,” Shelby said, easily, as she always did whenever Arnold was a total, stupid git and apologized for it later. Shelby had a strictly forgive-and-forget attitude towards others. It was likely the only way the two of them could have possibly managed to become friends.

            “Do you think he’ll be upset?” Rimmer asked, out of the blue, as Shelby leaned over and plucked the hand mirror from his fingertips, sliding into the side pocket of one of her many bags.

            “Who, my uncle?”

            “No, Lister. Because I yelled at him about the moggy and called it names.”

            “He’s probably a little hurt, yes.”

            “Oh, right. Of course he is,” Arnold replied, staring down at his boots. He’d polished them that morning, and aside from the tufts of black cat hair stubbornly clinging to the soles and laces, they looked quite sharp. “But do you think that he’ll keep on being upset, even after I say I’m sorry?”

            “Maybe,” Shelby said, zipping up the final zipper on her duffle bag, “You can’t expect an apology to fix everything that ever went wrong, Arn. It’s nice of you to make the effort, but  saying sorry—even when you mean it—isn’t always enough. Sometimes it takes more.”

            “Like what?” Arn demanded, hopping to his feet and starting to pace in front of Shelby’s bunk. “What sort of thing can I do that would be enough? What’s more powerful than an apology? Should I send him a card? Bring nip for the cat? Get down on my knees and smegging beg for forgiveness? It’s nonsense! It’s exhausting! It’s _horrible_. Why does anyone bother having friends when it could go so completely tits up at any moment?”

            Shelby watched him pace with patient eyes, taking one bag in hand and shoving the other into Rimmer’s arms as he made a turn. Rimmer ‘oofed’ at the collision and instinctively wrapped his lanky arms around the heavy suitcase, hugging it close.

            “Come on. You can walk me to the shuttle,” Shelby said, and Rimmer skittered after her obediently, desperate for answers.

            “But what do I do?” he pressed.

            “It’s a little tiff, Arnie. I doubt it’s going to require going the extra mile.”

            “But what if we have another argument? An actual fight, I mean? Something so big that even saying sorry isn’t enough? What do I do?”

            “Are you expecting to have a punch up over the holiday?”

            “Well, no, not necessarily, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I didn’t expect to have a screaming match this afternoon, either, and look what happened!”

            Shelby sighed as Arnold, in his agitation, passed her by on his long legs. She trotted along beside him to keep up, her considerably high heels click-clacking on the sidewalk with each rapid step. She looked nice. Arnold had neglected to mention it, all things considered, but she knew he knew, anyway. “I can’t tell you exactly what to do,” she informed her friend, crisply. “People are all different. They fight over different things, and they make up in different ways. Try to keep your feet out of your mouth and be as pleasant and understanding as you can. That’s all there is to it. And, honestly, in this particular case, you might want to lighten up on yourself a teeny bit. It wasn’t    nice of you to scream at Lister, sure, but you _have_ been pretty thoroughly trounced by that cat. Maybe instead of yelling at each other about Cat you could work together to make some ground rules, you know?”

            “Is ‘drown the moggy twerp’ a ground rule?” Arn muttered, ever hopeful.

            Shelby’s hands were too full of baggage to smack him, so she shot him a dagger-like expression of annoyance instead. “No,” she said, firmly, and Arnold sighed and let all happy thoughts of demon kitty murder fly out of his head like so many vaporous clouds.

            Service droids took Shelby’s bags from their hands and went to load them up into the patiently waiting shuttle. Other students milled around them, also hefting about bags and saying their goodbyes. Arnold felt a sudden tightness in his throat. It wasn’t the first time Shelby had left him over a long holiday, to be sure, but it was the first time she’d ever left him in the middle of a crisis. Before, Arnold had simply been left alone. And there were few aspects of spending time utterly on one’s own that could cause this level of consternation and gut-clenching uncertainty.

            Shelby put her arms around his waist and squeezed him tight. The embrace was awkward, considering their disproportional heights and Arnold’s own inexperience with displays of affection. Even so, it was well meant, and Shelby offered him a watery smile as she withdrew. She sniffled. “Now, you keep out of trouble as best you can, okay? And don’t be mean spirited. Stay calm and remember that he likes you and you like him and all you want to do is have a pleasant holiday together.”

            Arnold nodded agreeably, even allowing her to rise up on her tip toes and fuss about with his collar for a moment or two.

            “Your present’s in your duffle bag,” Arnold informed her, “Sorry it’s not wrapped. I meant to do it this morning, but things as they are, I didn’t get to it.”

            Shelby tutted. “That’s fine. Thank you. I had better get going.” She patted his arm one last time and then made her way toward the shuttle, throwing one last “Happy Christmas!” over her shoulder as she went. Shelby always had to have the last word.

            Arnold stood on the tarmac until the last student was loaded up and the coasting shuttle had arched up into the sky, out of sight in the obscuring smog. He stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets for warmth—his bared wrists did not escape the cold so easily, to his everlasting dismay—and sighed, unwilling to go back to face the music, as it were.

            Instead of going back to the dormitory, Rimmer made his way toward Old Rugger’s Studio. If he was going to sulk about and waste time, he might as well spend that time on something relaxing. Several partially completed projects waited for him in the large, empty studio, and he looked forward to channeling his anxieties and hurt feelings into something productive.

            The studio was warm and dry, a decidedly welcome change from the damp frigidity outside. Arn was almost positive that it would snow before the night was out. He didn’t much fancy the idea of trudging back to his dorm in snow, but that was a problem to be solved if and when it came about. For the moment, his only thought was of his waiting workspace and the remaining natural light filtering in.

            “Why, good afternoon, Mr. Rimmer, sir. It’s been a long time since we saw you here.”

            Arnold had lost track of the time. He’d started in on some detail work of a fire-breathing dragon in a field of wildflowers with mountains in the distance. It was a silly, self-indulgent piece, but Arn enjoyed the precise work required to bring each scale, petal, and crag to life from the textured paper with his worn-down pencil. Arnold took the interruption as a chance to sharpen said utensil as he greeted the service droid in turn.

            To Arnold, most service droids looked rather the same. The university had several custodial droids on staff, and they’d been bought as a batch a few years previous. They were all human enough to be familiar while utterly weird enough not to be frightening. This particular droid’s head was boxy and lipless with wide blue eyes and a dense, hairless brow, like all of his peers. Still, there was something about the mechanoid’s vocal programming that set it apart and rang a tiny bell of recognition in Rimmer’s brain.

            “Hello, uh…”

            “I’m called Kryten 24XB, sir.”

            “Kryten,” Arnold greeted, cagily. Shelby had told him time and again to be friendly to droids and sentient machines because it was the decent thing. Even so, it was rather unnerving to be on a first name basis with a glorified hoover. Despite his reservations, Arnold tried to smile at the mechanoid.

            “I had thought perhaps you’d lost your taste for late nights, Mr. Rimmer; you’ve not been here in so long,” Kryten said, amiably. Rimmer couldn’t help but sense that there was the slightest, subtle hint of accusation in the robot’s tone, as well. That idea was so preposterous, however, that he pushed it aside.

            Rimmer went back to sketching in the details of the dragon’s scales while watching Kryten dust the other easels from the corner of his eye, just in case. “Yes. Well, I’ve been rather busy lately, and I got into the habit of working in my dorm room, instead.”

            “But not tonight, sir?” Kryten asked, putting a special little flourish in the bend of his wrist as he rubbed charcoal dust off the legs of the nearest easel.

            Arnold, most of his attention on his pencil, shrugged. “I had a row with my roommate,” he replied, distant.

            The resulting agonized wail caused Arnold to jerk in surprise, his pencil leaving a thick, nasty line right across his page. “Smeg!” Arn yelped, going at the line fervently with his eraser while shooting daggers at the flailing mechanoid. “What the smegging smeg was that about, you jumped up vibrator?”

            “Oh, sir! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to cry out so, sir, it’s just that it was so tragic!”

            “What?” Arnold questioned, shocked into stillness. His expression of anger smoldered out into pure confusion, instead. “What are you talking about?”

            “Why, Mr. Rimmer, sir, you’d finally found yourself a friend and now you’ve ruined it. That’s absolutely awful. I’m so sorry to hear it! You must be crushed!”

            “I-Wha-I-you-it…smeg off!” Rimmer blustered, thrown for a loop and deeply insulted. He was especially insulted by how absolutely, horribly true the robot’s words were. It stung awfully to be reminded of his latest royal screw up, and by a nosy piece of machinery, no less.

            “Oh dear, oh dear, I’ve offended you. I’m so sorry. Please don’t be upset, sir. Let me bring you some tea.” And then Kryten flailed and worried himself right out the door, leaving his dust rag behind in his haste.

            Rimmer, teeth grinding and leg jittering up and down, took deep, shaky breaths through his nose and tried to erase the marring line on his drawing. Damn mechanoid. Damn Cat. Damn Lister. Damn him, even, for somehow wandering right into this ridiculous parody of a life. And to think, everything used to be so simple and orderly, back when Lister was just ‘the Lump’. Life had also been dreadfully lonely and not nearly so interesting, sure, but he was too annoyed at the moment to pay those particular facts much mind.

            Kryten returned as Rimmer finished rubbing the offensive mark into something only slightly less heinous. Loath to cause the mechanoid any more emotional outbursts—emotional outbursts from a mop! Honestly, those robotics people were insane!—Rimmer took the offered tea and biscuits without complaint. He assured the droid a hundred times over that all was forgiven, no, never mind, please stop making those awful noises, yes the tea is excellent, please go back to cleaning, no, I don’t need another digestive, honestly, thank you so much, goodbye. By the time he’d managed to wave the mechanoid off, Arnold was absolutely drained of all energy and keen to call it a night. He carefully packed away his now ruined drawing and his precious pencils and zipped his windbreaker right up to his chin before braving the snowy trek back to where Lister and the Cat lay in wait.

            The snow was coming down much harder than it had appeared from the warm, brightly lit shelter of Rugger’s. By the time Rimmer had reached the edge of the quad, the fall was up to his knees and his trousers and boots were soaking. Shivering, teeth chattering, and nostrils flaring with each ragged breath, Arnold thumped and shuffled his way towards comfort and light inch by careful inch.

            “Oh for Christssake,” Rimmer groaned about halfway across the quad, which seemed to have tripled in size since last he trekked his way across it. The snow, black and reeking with pollutants, had risen up to his hipbones, and convincing his legs to power through the wet, dense mess was proving an impossible task. “I am going to die here,” Arnold declared to no one in particular. “I am going to be buried in the fermented sludge this planet calls snow and no one will find my corpse until mid-spring, if that.”

            He grunted softly and planted his toes down toward the ground, leaning forward to compress some of the snow forward with the weight of his entire body. It allowed him a few more inches of open space and he wiggled into it with determination, assuring himself that he was going in the right direction though, in honesty, all was thick, soiled whiteness as far as the eye could see.

            “Lister and the Cat will be glad, when I die,” he continued on, taking heart in the bitter rant. He rarely ever got to be good and vocally bitter, anymore. Shelby wouldn’t allow it. She said it was upsetting to people. In that moment, Arnold didn’t care in the least. He was angry, and annoyed, and tired, and cold, and he was damn well going to bitch about it. “They can be grotty, flea-ridden bums together. They’ll probably turn my workspace into a new, bigger, better litter tray.”

            Snow packed itself into the tread of Rimmer’s boots, destroying all possible traction. His foot shuffled on the densely-packed surface of the snow underneath and he slipped backwards, only barely regaining his balance in time. He grimly patted his hands together, trying to knock away the clods of gooey, tar-ridden ice from his gloves. Finally, unable to clear them properly and made to suffer the slow, sluggish seeping of ice-cold water into the knit and onto his skin, he took the edge of a finger of each into his teeth and tugged the offensive, sopping wet articles off. He tossed them aside. They were mostly more hole than yarn, anyway, and not worth saving.

            Rimmer had forcibly pushed, wiggled, shuffled, and flailed his way through the icy sludge and made his way to what—he hoped, anyway—was the far edge of the quad when he realized he was having a difficult time drawing in a breath. Unfortunately, though he had kept up his bitter rant with nary a pause the entire trek, he knew himself to be in much better physical condition than to be so winded.

            Instead, he was suddenly acutely aware of the smoke-y odors hanging pungently in the air. The air that felt so dense as to be a tangible thing, as thick and unyielding as the snow packed tightly around his hips. Rimmer choked and gasped, desperate to pull the oxygen out of the congealed air. He knew, in some back part of his mind, that it was a false impression. The cold night air wasn’t   a solidifying mass. There was plenty of oxygen to go around, even if it was tinged heavily with chemical pollutants and pan-fried ozone. It was all in his mind. Unfortunately, that didn’t make it any less dangerous.

            Rimmer’s vision, already compromised by the whiteout—no, blackout, here—shimmered and shifted. He glanced down at his reddened fingers in a vain attempt at clarity and watched in horror and bemusement as the offending fingers doubled and then tripled in number before his tear-filled eyes. Still gasping in harsh, ragged pulls of air, his chest tight and burning, Rimmer scrambled against the snow and tried to jump up in the air, hoping to clear a larger section of ground if he could only get above the snow. His toes snagged on the ice, instead, and he pitched forward, landing face-down into the mucky snow and sinking down several inches toward the ground. Sputtering and coughing, his already agonized lungs now full of ice and grit, Arnold squirmed and pushed against the snow as if he were in a vast ocean, desperate to break out of the water and out into the air once more. The only problem with that analogy is that Arn couldn’t actually swim for shit.

            _I really am going to die,_ Arnold thought as he gave up the fight, lying on his side in a trench of black snow, gasping and gaping like a doomed fish, _I’m going to die eight-hundred meters from sanctuary. I’m going to die a friendless, witless virgin with an ‘h’ on my forehead and grit in my lungs. What a smeghead._

            He was just imagining with dread that they might send his body back to Io when an abrupt, intense pressure descended on his shoulders and he found himself being pulled up out of the snow and up into the sky. He saw stars—not real stars, he realized later, but stars none the less—and caught the familiar, spicy scent of chicken vindaloo in his next dozen or so rapid, choking breaths.

            “Rimmer?” Lister said, giving him a bit of a shake as if hoping to rattle him out of the obvious fit he was in. “You’re all right, guy,  breathe. Come on, then. Don’t worry, I’m here. Can you put your feet down properly? I know I’ve told ye before, but you’re smeggin’ heavy.”

            Dazed and still breathless, Rimmer gained some of his previous footing and allowed himself to be led through the thick snow, Lister’s hand gripping far too tightly around his forearm. Before he could quite understand what was happening, Lister tugged him forward and pushed him down. He expected to land arse-first in the snow again, but instead he found himself sitting heavily on some sort of triangular seat.

            “A friend of Keyser’s heard me lookin’ for a way across the snow an’ offered up his space bike,” Lister explained as he slide into the driver’s place in front of Rimmer and turned over the engine. The sleek, hover-capable machine immediately started to purr. Rimmer gripped Lister by the shoulders, the sudden rise into the air bombarding him with a fresh wave of nauseating dizziness. He continued to clutch to Lister in this way long after they had coasted safely over the snow and traveled the half mile to the dorm. The final landing was jarring and made Rimmer’s teeth clack together. Or maybe that was the cold making him shiver; he couldn’t tell anymore.

            Lister was off the bike in a mere second and stooping over Rimmer, one of his leather-gloved hands pressed palm down on Rimmer’s heaving chest while the other circled against the nape of his neck, squeezing gently. “Rimmer. Arn, man, you’re sort of freaking me out, here. Ya gotta breathe normal, a’right? Nothin’ wrong with the air. No more than usual, anyway. Take a deep breath for me, eh?” Lister paused, demonstrating a few slow, deep, easy breaths. Rimmer managed a fair approximation of the gesture, and they did the monkey-see-monkey-do routine for several long minutes. Eventually, the air had transformed once more from oppressive solid to familiar gas, and Rimmer was breathing easy again. He’d always been a remarkable mimic.

            “C-cold,” Arnold greeted, after taking a long, full breath that made his lungs twinge in exhausted protest.

            “Yeah, I know it. Come on, let’s go inside.”

            Arn’s legs were gelatinous, it felt like, and he was shaking so hard as to nearly vibrate right out of phase. He had a sudden, irrational vision of Lister’s steadying hand bleeding through him as if he were a ghost. Or a hologram. Remembering the ‘h’ on his forehead, his conversation with Shelby about ‘Deadies,’ and his own near demise out in the cold, Arnold’s guts twisted and he gagged.

            “Whoa, easy!” Lister yelped, though he didn’t loosen his hold, “Are you gonna sick up on me?”

            “No,” Arnold groaned, though in truth he wasn’t entirely sure he was being truthful.

            “Well, if you do, try not to get it on me coat. I’ve this right prig of a roommate that got it for me, and he’d be upset.”

            “Bastard,” Rimmer replied, weakly. His neck didn’t want to support his head, anymore. His head was full of thoughts and bees and snow and it weighed five hundred million tons. It lolled about on his weak, pathetic, pencil neck and landed with a resounding thud on Lister’s shoulder. “Fuck.”

            Lister didn’t seem to mind too much. With Lister as a crutch and head navigator, they managed to make their way down the halls to the safety of their dorm. Lister sat Rimmer down on his bunk and rushed about, going to put on the electric kettle and dig up Rimmer’s favored cup. Lister was a blur of activity, which was remarkable all on its own. Arnold was a little too dazed and exhausted to make exact notice of his rapid movements, however. One minute Lister was fiddling with the kettle, then he was tugging at Rimmer’s windbreaker, nattering something about needing to get out of his wet things. Then Rimmer was in his boxer shorts and wrapped up in all of his own blankets as well as some of Lister’s and the Scouser was nowhere to be seen, though soon enough he returned, saying something about Keyser and the bike and how red Rimmer’s fingers were and, somewhere in the midst of all of that, several heartfelt apologies and something about Cat.

            When Rimmer’s brain finally thawed out and caught up, he found himself a human burrito laid out on his bunk with a tower of pillows behind his back and one of his hands wrapped around a boiling hot mug of tea while the other was trapped between the wide-palmed, stubby fingered hands of one exceptionally worried-looking gerbil-faced bum.

            Rimmer grimaced. Lister was chafing his hand between his own with all the vigor of a Kryten on floor-buffing day. “Ow, git,” Arnold snapped, though in reality the admonishment came out as more of a breathy croak. Wonderful. He was probably going to develop pneumonia and die horribly, anyway. Despite the weakness of the jab, Lister reacted appropriately and let Rimmer’s hand drop with a guilty expression.

            “Sorry.  Tryin’ to help.”

            Arnold took in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. He took solace in his teacup, warmed inside and out by the blessedly perfect tea. When had Lister learned how to make a decent cuppa? “Thank you,” he managed, once he was well lubricated and in marginally better spirits. “Honestly. I thought I was going to die out there.”

            Lister didn’t seem mollified or put at ease with the show of gratitude. “What were you _doing_ out there?” he demanded, pulling one of his braids towards his lips and chewing on the end. Rimmer winced. That was one nasty habit that Lister couldn’t seem to shake off, and it was distressing to witness as well as incredibly gross.

            “I was coming back to the room, of course. I went to the studio for a bit. It didn’t look so bad, when I left Rugger’s.”

            “You’re an idiot,” Lister said, bluntly. “You’d think someone as cowardly as you would know better than to go out in the middle of a smeggin’ blizzard. Bad enough you nearly froze to death. You’ll probably get air sick, on top of it.”

In this case, “air sick” referred not to the state of nausea that some people experienced in flight but to an illness specific to Earth and due entirely to its inordinately high rate of airborne pollutants. While extended time spent outside without protection was acceptable, an extended period of time outside during rain, fog, snow, or any sort of precipitation was asking for it. The going theory was that the wetter the air was, the more the gunk collected per air molecule, effectively hitting a person’s lungs with a concentrated dose of chemical cocktail. Rimmer’s bitter thoughts about pneumonia weren’t so far-fetched at all. Lister was especially nervous about the possibility of air sickness, considering that Arnold had been practically suffocating when he’d finally found him in the snow.

            “I’m not cowardly,” Rimmer argued, rather vehemently. When he was a child, “coward” was right up there with “bonehead” on the list of insults lobbed at him. Both brands stung him down to the core, reminding him of old hurts and torments, some deserved and some not. The point was, however, that Rimmer was _not_ a coward. Sure, he was constantly anxious, and sometimes that anxiety practically drowned him in its intensity, but he wasn’t a coward. A coward would never have been able to leave Io and his family behind and make his way, alone and unaided, on Earth. Not on your life, squire.

            “Yeah, a’right,” Lister agreed, probably just to keep from starting another shouting match.

            Speaking of shouting, “Where’s the moggy?”

            Lister tugged at his braid and gnawed at it with more fervor. “I gave him away.”

            Rimmer sat up so abruptly that his tea sloshed over the edge of his cup and splattered, burning hot, over his thumb. “What?” he demanded, hardly noticing the sting.

            Lister nodded, looking shamefaced and on the edge of tears about it all. “After ye left, I got to thinkin’ about how you and Cat didn’t get along and how it wasn’t fair for you to have to keep gerting hurt, nor fair to the Cat to have to get so upset. An’ there’s no shortage of nice places for him to sleep in the dormitory, and lots of folks were interested in looking after such a nice kitty. An’ I can still visit him, if I want, ‘cos he’d be nearby. So I gave him over to one of Twix’s friends that stayed behind for the hols, for the time being.”

            “You…gave up your cat for me?” Rimmer questioned, utterly baffled.

            “Yeah, I guess. An’ for the Cat, too, of course. You did shout awful loudly at him.” Lister sniffled and brushed his braids back over his shoulder. “I want everyone to be happy.”

            “You are one hell of a decent fellow, Listy,” Rimmer said, and he meant it.

            Lister smiled slightly, rubbing at his eyes with the backs of his hands, reminding Rimmer of a small, tired child. It made Arnold feel rather tender towards him, in that moment, the entire Cat situation notwithstanding.

            “You ought to get some sleep,” Rimmer said, with a yawn of his own. “It’s late. And it has to have been exhausting, lugging me all the way back home like that.”

            “Home?” Lister echoed, as if he barely dared to hope that he’d heard Rimmer correctly.

            Rimmer rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling awkward suddenly as he realized how much weight that particular word carried. Certainly, this place, with this man, was the closest thing to home he’d experienced, well, ever. “Yes. Home,” he replied, leaving no doubts about it. It was the season for that sort of schmaltzy nonsense, anyway.

            Lister smiled and took Rimmer’s empty tea cup, shutting off the lights on his way back toward the bunks. Rimmer waited patiently while Lister climbed up into the top bunk, causing the whole of both beds to shiver and shake a he got situated. The sounds of Lister huddling into his self-made nest and smacking his lips against the taste of toothpaste—he was still getting used to brushing his teeth more than a few times a week, the poor sod—were familiar and comforting. Rimmer closed his eyes, feeling the full extent of his excursion through the snow weighing heavily upon his lids.

            “Rimmer?” Lister whispered, hesitantly.

            “Yeah?” Rimmer yawned back. Lister often wanted to talk long after lights out.

            “I was thinkin’, before we—well, I was gonna ask.”

            “Ask what?” Rimmer prodded, as he knew he was supposed to do.

            “You wanna watch a film with me tomorrow? S’my favorite one, and it’s appropriate, ‘cos of the season and all.”

            “Mmm? What is it?”

            A pause. “ _It’s a Wonderful Life_ ,” Lister said.

            And Rimmer, who’d never heard of it, nodded into his pillows and snuggled into the soft, warm, fuzzy cradle of his bunk. “All right.”

            “ Really? Wicked. Thanks, Arn.”

            Arnold offered a high, whimper-like snore in reply. He dreamed that night of having his head forced into an icy pool of water by his brothers, Frank, John, and Howard. He felt all six of their hands on him, their combined strength far more than any small boy such as he could hope to escape. The water rushed into his lungs and he choked, but the ragged pull for air he attempted did nothing but bring more water in, until he was gasping on it and his chest was burning and he knew, with certainty, that he was going to die and absolutely no one would care.


	7. Chapter 7

Lister was shaking him and saying his name, his tone shaded with an unusual amount of panic. Instinctively, Rimmer lashed out at the man, confused between the nightmare he’d been having and the reality of Lister’s hands tight on his arms. His flailing hand caught Lister in the jaw, and the other man rocked backward, surprised by the force of it, though it’d done him no actual harm.

            Lister clapped rapidly three times and the room flooded with light. Rimmer hissed and blinked under the force of it. His head was absolutely pounding, and his whole body was shaky and aching, as if he’d decided to go through his usual morning exercise routine fifty times over and at four times the speed. “Ow! What’s that for?” Rimmer growled, indicating the brightness of the lights with one hand while throwing his other arm over his eyes and falling back onto his pillows with a low, sullen groan.

            Lister hovered nearby, his anxious expression entirely lost to his roommate. “You were havin’ a nightmare,” Lister explained, hurriedly. “You started screamin’ and then you were gasping all over like you were when I found in the snow. I thought maybe you were getting air sick or something. I’m sorry I woke ye up.”

            Arnold sighed and slowly eased his arm away from his eyes. He still had to squint, but at least the slow acclamation to it didn’t make him feel like someone was driving seventeen ice picks into his brain. “I’m all right,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

            Lister did not do as he was told. Rimmer wasn’t surprised. Lister would have made a horrible subordinate, Rimmer thought hazily, though unsure of the sense behind the stray musing. He was tired, and things were a bit of a muddle of memory, reality, and imagination in his mind. Lister was still standing there, wringing his stubby-fingers together and looking as if he were about half a second away from chewing with anxiety on his braids again, the mere thought of which made Rimmer want to gag.

            “You’re not going to listen to me, are you?” Rimmer sighed, sitting up in his bunk and rubbing his hands over his face.

            “Nah,” Lister said, moving to start up the kettle so as to put another cup of tea in his hands. At this rate, Rimmer thought, they were definitely going to run out. “Probably not.”

            “It was only a nightmare,” Rimmer said.

            “I’ve had nightmares,” Lister agreed, “One time, I dreamed that I was made entirely of peppermint hard candies, and me Gran—she loved peppermint candies, you see—kept breaking off bits of me and eating them. An’ pretty soon I was nothing but a head screaming ‘nah, nah, don’t eat me!’” Lister affected a high pitched tone and put his hands up toward the sky as if shielding off a giant, hungry opponent. Then his arms dropped and he gazed somberly at Rimmer. “What you had weren’t like that at all, mate. I thought you were choking.”

            There were not enough words in the entire English and Ionian dictionaries combined to describe how badly Rimmer did not wish to discuss this with Lister. He’d only spoken of it twice before, once to a court-mandated therapist following his divorce from his family, and again many years later to Shelby while lying in the Observation Deck, drunk off his ass and unable to keep the words from pouring out.

            Lister was chewing on his braids.

            Rimmer pushed himself up off his bunk and padded past the man to pour and prepare the tea. He pushed one cup into Lister’s hand and batted the braid away from his lips before returning to his bunk. He sat carefully and took a few sips of the warm drink, trying to steady his nerves and put his thoughts in order. “Sit down,” he suggested, “this might take a while to tell.”

            Lister, to his credit, pulled up his desk chair and sat so close to Rimmer that their knees brushed. “I’m listening,” he promised.

            “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Rimmer muttered, more at his tea than to Lister. He looked up and met the Scouser’s warm brown gaze. “The last time I told someone this, I was three sheets to the wind. It was easier, that way.”

            Lister hopped abruptly to his feet and strode over to his worktable. After a moment of digging through the bottom drawer, he produced a wide silver flask. Without prompting, he poured a bit into his cup and nearly three times as much into Rimmer’s. “Better?”

            “A little more,” Rimmer pressed, and Lister obliged him without question, his expression open and understanding. Rimmer quailed to think what shade of pity and disgust Lister’s expression would take on once he’d actually been told the tale.

            For a while they sat silently, knee to knee, while Rimmer took steady sips of his doctored tea. Whatever Lister had had in the flask was exceptionally strong. It smelled like paint thinner and burned all the way down his throat, spreading out inside of his stomach like dancing flames. Rimmer pulled aside one of the blankets wrapped around his torso and stared fixatedly at this stomach, convinced that his abdomen must surely be glowing like a pot-bellied stove.

            “Rimmer?” Lister said, softly, touching his fingertips to Rimmer’s knee to get the man’s attention. Arnold sat up straighter and let the blanket fall back into place. He felt like he was floating, and his toes were tingly and Lister’s face, drawn with concern and more than a little anxiety, seemed to have a special shine, like starlight, around his eyes. Rimmer only barely succeeded in keep himself from reaching out and attempting to capture those tiny stars in his hands. Wow, that was good stuff. It still wasn’t nearly enough—he’d been far more shit-faced the night Lister and Shelby had dragged him back to the dorms—but it was better than nothing at all.

            “Sometimes I forget how to breathe,” he began, nodding up and down as if to verify the words coming out of his own mouth. He wrapped his longer-fingered hands around the warm teacup and gripped tight, savoring the warmth. As if to punctuate his words, he took in a deep, measured breath and let it out again slowly through his nose. Lister sat, silent and alert, and waited for him to continue.

            “My family and I weren’t…we didn’t. Well. I had a mother and a father and three older brothers. Mummy was a society lady, and status was of the utmost importance to her. Nothing else mattered in the least. Failure to live up to her expectations meant failure to earn her love or, indeed, even her most basic attention. My father wanted to be in the Space Corps since he was a boy, but he was one inch below the regulation height. He didn’t fulfill his dream, you see, and I suppose it made him more than a little mad. He used to put me and my brothers on a rack and stretch us out, you see, so we’d all be tall enough for the Space Corps, one day. My brothers and I didn’t get along. When I was young, I tried to pass of their torments as the typical childish games, you know. But the more times I found myself with broken bones, the more that feeling of normalcy faltered. I don’t know that I ever would have understood how much they hated me if it wasn’t for the concussion when I was seven.”

            Lister interrupted with a pained noise, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly agape, as if he couldn’t believe what Rimmer was saying or, indeed, how calmly—if drunkenly, and all in a rush—he was saying it. Rimmer shrugged and waved him off. “It wasn’t so bad. I was only in the coma for a few hours. Besides, that’s not the point of this story. I just thought you needed to understand that my life back in Io had never been exactly…sane.”

            Lister swallowed thickly, forcing down whatever he’d been about to say. He nodded, motioning for Rimmer to continue on. His story came out in starts and stops, sometimes broken into nonsense fragments, some sections told more than once, repeated over and over as if he were tasting the words. Such was the simple by product of his drunkenness and the difficulty of the memories involved, but the core of his tale went like this:

            “It happened just after my fourteenth birthday. And I mean it, when I say ‘just after.’ I’d barely blown out the candles on my cake. Mummy had allowed me a cake, that year, because I’d lied and told them I’d earned myself a place on the swimming team at school. I told them I’d gotten medals. I made the medals myself with a makeshift smelting pot, a papier-mâché mold, and a bit of ribbon. They looked as close to the real thing as I could manage. I was relieved beyond belief when Mummy and Father were fooled. It was the one good thing I’d managed to do, the one expectation of theirs I’d managed to achieve, in over twelve years. The fact that it was all one big, giant fib didn’t matter to me, at the time. I’d have lied and cheated a thousand times over to keep that tiny sliver of respect that I had earned.

            But Mummy had allowed me a cake, and my brothers were furious about it. It’s not that they didn’t get to have cakes at their birthdays, because they always did. They even got presents. Mummy even hugged my brother John, once. He’d run for student council president, you see, and won. It was the only time I can remember her ever embracing any of us, and it was John who managed it, just that once. Anyway, what I mean is that it wasn’t jealousy, exactly, that made them do it. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe if that was all it was, I could understand it. Could have even…forgiven…though, no, probably not. Probably not.”

            Rimmer took another deep, slow breath. He was looking a bit green about the gills, and Lister was uncertain if that was a byproduct of the drink or something about what was to come. On an impulse, the man reached over and gripped Rimmer’s hand, giving it a friendly squeeze. Rimmer blinked owlishly and offered Lister a dopey smile of thanks, squeezing back with clammy fingers.

            “After the cake was eaten and Mummy went to bed and Father went to drink his evening port, John and Frank and Howard came up to me. They surrounded me on all sides, and they were smiling.  Truly smiling, I mean. Friendly smiles. I was so pleased with myself, at the time. I thought I’d finally broken my lifelong string of bad luck, you see. I thought that that one lie about my medals was finally going to change the entire course of my life. From then on, I would be a favored son, as my brothers were. I would achieve exactly what I was meant to, and earn the love and respect of them all. I thought they were coming to extend a truce.

            “It was Frank, I think, who suggested it. He said that they wanted to give me a birthday present. I was overjoyed. I couldn’t remember having ever gotten a birthday present, before. They knew how much I loved the stars, he said, and I agreed heartily because I did. I do. I hated the thought of the Space Corps. I hated the idea of being out in the blackness with replicated food and stale ship air. I was afraid of the idea of conflict and physical training and carrying a gun. I didn’t want to be an officer any more than a gnat wants to be God. But I did love the stars. Frank said they were going to give me the stars. They had acquired a space suit from a buddy. His father was in the Corps, and he had a few of his old, functional suits around as souvenirs. They’d borrowed the suit for me, Frank said. They wanted to help me touch the stars.

            All of the providences on Io are contained in domes. The domes are absolutely enormous, of course. You have to get very high to touch one, at the tippy top. But my family and I lived closer to the edge, next to one of the ventilation tubes. The tubes are these enormous constructs, you see. They sit upright in the ground and go all the way up to the dome. They’re meant to be used for trash and waste extraction. The refuse is collected over the span of years and years, and when it gets to be too much to store on planet, anymore, special sanitation droids pack it all up and push it out into space through those tubes. Active tubes were completely inaccessible. They were guarded day and night by trained personnel. In hindsight, that was probably to keep things like what happened from, well, happening.

            The tube next to our house was abandoned. It had a leak, and no one had wanted to bother to repair it, so they’d  shut it down and boarded it up. My brothers had found a way past the boards. They wanted me to get into the suit and climb into the tube and travel out of the dome and into space.”

            Rimmer paused. He tried to take another deep breath, but it caught in his throat, breaking up into smaller, quicker gasps. The teacup in his free hand was rattling, his fingers trembling. He’d had a hell of a night, and now he was recounting another hellish night as best he could, well aware of Lister’s growing horror as he listened, his fingers now vice-tight around Rimmer’s own.

            “Ye don’t have to tell the rest,” Lister assured him, his voice barely a croak. “I can gather what happened. They sent you out into space, didn’t they, like they said?” Rimmer nodded, unable to reply verbally, his throat tight. “But something was wrong with the suit.”

            Rimmer swallowed a few times, closing his eyes so as not to have to look at Lister. “The oxygen tank was compromised. I’d barely floated out above the dome when I realized that I couldn’t get enough air. My brothers…I don’t know if they knew. I still don’t know, for certain, if it was malicious or another dumb case of my awful luck. They pulled me back in in enough time. John called a doctor. Howard woke up Mummy and Frank went for my Father. Not a one of them thought to stay with me. I lay on the ground and stared up at the stars through the dome and knew I was going to die.”

            “But you didn’t,” Lister reminded, slowly.

            “No. Mummy had an oxygen pack for her own personal use—allergies, she’d always said. She used it on me until the doctor came. To this day, it’s probably the most maternal thing she ever did for my sake.”

            “And now you forget to breathe, sometimes…?” Lister pressed, not content to let it lie until he knew as many of the details as possible. He felt that this was a crucial time; understanding this moment in Rimmer’s history was the answer to understanding the center of his being. If he ever wanted to truly know the man, this was the key to everything that drove Rimmer to become the man he was today rather than the man his parents had wanted.

            Rimmer tried to take another sip of tea but found that his cup was empty. He went through the motions of swallowing, regardless, and nodded, shifting about uncomfortably as he set the empty cup aside. “I had to be on bed rest for days after. My father was patient, at first, but that didn’t last. The longer the incident kept me in bed, the more likely it was that I had suffered serious damage from it. The more damaged I was…”

            “The less likely it was you’d get in to the Corps,” Lister finished, unhappily.

            “Yes. I think after a while he started to assume I was faking.”

            “…Were you?”

            Rimmer gritted his teeth. He could understand why Lister would ask, of course. Honestly, if he’d had the chance, he probably would have milked the situation for all it was worth. It was the only time he could remember his mother treating him with anything but abject disdain, and his brothers had been so cowed by her anger for their involvement that they’d laid off on teasing him completely. “No,” he said, simply, and left it at that. “But he thought so, and he was determined to rouse me out of my supposed deception and back on my feet like a good little soldier.” Rimmer’s voice was bitterer than Lister had ever heard, and he had been on the receiving end of quite a lot of Rimmer’s ire, before.

            “He tried, at first, to shout me out. He screamed at me to get up and on my feet. He demanded me to run laps and show how fit I was. But I could barely sit up, and I couldn’t do what he wanted. The more he yelled, though, the more scared I got, and I did try, I honestly did. Eventually, I was half in and half off the bed, sweating like a pig and practically turning blue for want of air. Father gave up on me, then, and decided that the only thing for it was to make sure I learned my lesson. If I wanted to suffocate myself to death—my brothers’ involvement were ignored in this matter, of course—then he’d damn well see to it I succeeded.”

            “Rimmer,” Lister said, impatiently. He’d watched Rimmer gasp and shudder his way to this point and could take it no longer. “It’s all right. I get the idea. You can stop.”

            Rimmer shook his head vigorously. He’d come too smegging far to stop now. He gulped in a few much-needed breaths and pulled his knees up to his chest, hugging his legs close. In this position, his tall— _stretched out_ , Lister thought, with horror—lanky form was rendered tiny and helpless. He was shaking like a leaf, and even though consciously Lister was aware that his shudders were not due to the cold, the man still felt compelled to lean forward and pull Rimmer’s blankets more snuggly around him. Rimmer didn’t seem to notice. He stared off into the middle distance, entirely lost to the memory as he finished his tale.

            “He crouched down beside where I was sprawled on the edge of the bed and lit up one of his favorite cigars. ‘My boy,’ he said, ‘my useless smeg of a son. This is for your own good, you know.’ And then he quoted one of his favorite axioms at me, something he’d said again and again in my childhood, though I’d never realized how deeply he meant it until that moment. ‘Better dead than smeg,’ he said, and blew the smoke from his cigar right in my face.”

            Arnold was tired. Physically, he’d been put through the ringer. Mentally, he was worn through. Emotionally, he was barely hanging on. “Sometimes the smoke still triggers me,” he murmured, distantly. Lister had a sudden understanding of that night when they’d first met properly and how viciously Rimmer had asked him to put out his cig.

            “Sorry, guy,” Lister whispered, though he knew apologizing for that particular instance was ridiculous, and trying to offer apology for what had happened in Rimmer’s past was even more folly. “What happened next?” Lister pressed, aware that the story Rimmer insisted on finishing was finally at its end, and thank all that was good and holy for that.

            Rimmer rested his chin on his knees. “He tried to strangle me, obviously,” he said, tone hollowed out, as if he couldn’t work up the gumption to feel much about it, anymore. “Frank came in about then to bring me soup. He saw what was happening and started to yell. I don’t remember much of what happened then, for certain. I woke up in the hospital, and my family was nowhere to be seen. A police man and a small woman with a clipboard came to visit me. They both asked me a lot of questions, and I answered them honestly, because I was afraid if I lied they’d send my parents to jail.” Rimmer smiled thinly, as if the idea that he’d cared enough to worry about his parents being punished for all that they had done was laughable, now. “It turns out that I had a pretty solid case of abuse to put against my parents. By Ionian law, I was too old to be considered a minor, and therefore I couldn’t be taken away from my parents by the government. I could, however, by the grace of some ridiculous loophole in the system, file for divorce.”

            “Yer divorced from your family?” Lister questioned, eyebrows raised high.

            Rimmer shrugged. “Yes. I haven’t seen them in ten years. After the divorce was final, I stayed at my boarding school until I’d completed the standard compulsory education. By then I was eighteen, old enough to apply for dual citizenship off planet.” He smiled ruefully at Lister. “To be honest, with my history, Earth was sort of the only place that would take me.”

            Lister felt a sudden warm, fuzzy feeling for his home planet deep in his chest. “Yeah,” he agreed, “this blue marble has always been pretty fair about takin’ anybody who’d have her. I’m glad you could be here, mate. I truly am.”

            Rimmer’s smile lost some of its bitter edge. Lister had accepted his sordid tale of woe with all the warmth and understanding he should have expected from the man. “You don’t think any less of me, then? For running away, I mean.”

            Lister shook his head, somber again. “No, Arn. I think it’s brave. You coulda gone right back home, you know. You could have lied to that police man and that lady and gone right back to how things were ‘cos you were too afraid of the unknown. What you did was brave.”

            Rimmer closed his eyes. He couldn’t even imagine where that path would have taken him. He would have probably tried, and failed, to get into the Corps. He would have, on the insistence of his mother, gone into space some other way, instead, maybe in one of those big JMC ships that were all the rage, these days. He could have worked his way up the ranks via the corporation, taken the Astro-Navigation test for qualifications, and become an officer. Maybe even a pilot. It wouldn’t have been what his parent’s wanted, but it would have been close enough that he would have killed himself trying to achieve it all, no matter how much he’d hate ever single solitary second of it. Rimmer shuddered and opened his eyes again; he pulled a face so gruesome that Lister had to laugh.

            “I’m sorry I was an idiot and got lost in the snow,” Rimmer said, sincerely. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

            “It’s all right. I s’pose everybody is allowed to do stupid things one time or another. I’m glad you’re okay, Rimmer, really.”

            Rimmer yawned. “Me, too,” he murmured, pulling his blankets about himself and falling back into his bunk. “I’m going to sleep, now. My head is floating.”

            Lister’s tone was fond and amused. He stood up from his chair and yanked at Rimmer’s blankets until the man gave them up with a groan of protest. “You can’t go to sleep with them all wadded up like tha’,” Lister argued, laying the blankets far more neatly over Rimmer’s form, “They’ll get wrinkles.” His tone was teasing and light, poorly mimicking Rimmer’s own rounded, posh tones.

            “Smeg off,” Rimmer said, his voice muffled as he pressed his face solidly into Lister’s pillow; he’d never gotten around to giving it back. It had lost most of its scent, by then, but there was still enough clinging on to make it worthwhile.

            Lister finished tucking Rimmer securely in. For a brief moment he hesitated, his hand warm and heavy between Rimmer’s shoulder blades. He stood as long as he dared, feeling Rimmer breathe. The man was sufficiently calm again, and he drew in air in easy, measured pulls, in and out and in again. He was alive, and the air was fine. Lister felt a knot of tension in his own shoulders ease.

            “Goodnight, oh goitface,” Lister offered, clapping off the lights and clambering into the top bunk.

            “G’ni’, Sweetheart,” Rimmer said to his pillow in a tone-deaf croon, clearly already mostly asleep.

            Lister muffled his amused, giddy giggles in his own pillows, feeling a flood of relief and affection that rushed out from his heart to his fingertips and toes in one great, warm, wave. Rimmer was alive. He wasn’t unmarred, by any means, or unbroken, but he was alive and fussy and cantankerous and bitchy and he was, by far, the best mate Lister had ever had in his whole entire life. Lister thanked whatever deity might be listening that Arnold J. Rimmer had lived. And a deeper, darker part of Lister thanked the same almighty power that Rimmer had nearly died; otherwise, horror of horrors, they might have never met.


	8. Chapter 8

“This is ridiculous,” Arnold declared.

            “Shut up,” Lister said, throwing a handful of popcorn at the other man. They’d only just started watching the film, and Arn was already bitching. Not that Lister was exactly surprised by the reaction. Arnold didn’t seem the type to go in for the charm of George Bailey’s never ending self-sacrifice for the sake of those he loved. Still, after the first shut down, Arnold fell into a sullen silence and didn’t voice his opinion again for many long minutes.

            They had snuck the vid disc down to the big communal lobby in the dormitory, pleased to find the space completely uninhabited due to so many students being out for the holiday. Arnold was pleased to find the room empty because his head was pounding and his throat was sore and he couldn’t stand the thought of having to deal with anything even resembling a crowd. Whatever Lister’s flask had contained caused one hell of a hangover. Lister was pleased at the remote state of the room because he knew for a fact that _It’s a Wonderful Life_ always, without fail, turned him into a sobbing, sniffling wreck, and he’d like to keep as few people from witnessing such a display as possible. To allow Rimmer in on such an event was an honor and a half, even if the miserable man didn’t realize it.

            The two men were sprawled out on the largest, most comfortable couch, a bowl of popcorn between them. Lister leaned forward toward the screen, attentive and gleeful. Rimmer laid back, only half aware and mostly bone tired. Idly, he wished he’d thought to bring a sketchpad with him, though he had a feeling that Lister would have objected, anyway.

            Rimmer watched through half-lidded eyes as George Bailey proceeded from one selfless act to another. It was galling to think that people like that man might somehow actually exist. How could anyone live up to that kind of example? Arnold felt sick at the thought of the pressure, though that might have been a residual effect of his nasty snow-bound experience the night before. Each sacrifice led up to the final, most jarring moment of all, in which George Bailey and his young new bride offer up their honeymoon money, all $2,000, to assist the residents of the town who had lost all their money due to a bank run. Rimmer opened his mouth, about to object strongly about this utter crap, casting a scathing glance over to Lister. His words dried up in his throat, however, his mouth left hanging gormlessly open as he stared at his friend. Lister was crying. Real, gulping sobs issued forth from his lips as he watched, completely ensnared, the townspeople take as little as they could at George Bailey’s expense.

            Stunned by such a visceral reaction, even from his tender-souled roommate, Rimmer closed his mouth and sat back, silent. For the rest of the film, he kept part of his attention on the movie’s plot and all the rest of it, hyper focused, on Lister’s reaction to it. By the end of the movie, Lister was all teary-eyed, joyous smiles. He turned to Rimmer to ask his opinion and was startled to find the man staring at him with assessing, narrowed eyes.

            “Uh…did ye like it?”

            “It wasn’t what I expected,” Rimmer replied, still staring at Lister.

            Lister shifted about in his seat, discomfited. “I know it’s not for everyone,” he admitted, expecting that Rimmer hated the film so much he was trying to decide whether or not to strangle Lister for making him sit through it.

            “No, I suppose it isn’t,” Rimmer said, but there was something odd about his tone, as if he were saying one thing but actually talking about another. Lister had never been good at that kind of double-talk.

            “Right,” Lister said, drawing the word out carefully. “You wanna get something to eat?”

            “You gave up Cat for me,” Rimmer said, apropos of nothing.

            “Yeah, man,” Lister said, struggling to shift conversational gears, “I told ye. I wanted everyone to be happy.”

            Rimmer nodded. Yes. Lister wanted everyone to be happy, like George Bailey. Lister wasn’t as clean cut, or even maybe _quite_ as selfless, but he was still one of the absolute most decent blokes Rimmer had ever had the fortune of meeting. And for a man who was certain that he’d never had any luck in his entire life, admitting that Lister counted as some sort of boon from the universe was no easy feat. “I am happy,” Arnold said, though he hadn’t thought he was, actually, until right that second.

            Lister smiled. It was the big, bright, pinball grin. Arn’s heart did the rumba and his lungs tapped danced and his stomach formed a conga line with his pancreas and followed along behind, and whatever moves his more private bits were making would probably get them disqualified at the national level. _Smeg,_ Arnold thought, frantically trying to close down the band and send the dancers packing, _Smeg, smeg, smeggity smegging smeg._ His entire body was doing the metaphorical, twenty-four hour dance extravaganza for David Lister, and it could only end in puss-filled blisters and shattered hearts.

            “It’s a ridiculous, idealistic, sappy, old-fashioned mess of a film,” Rimmer said, jerking his chin at the screen to emphasize his point. He turned back to Lister, registering the look of heartbroken acceptance on the man’s face, but barreling on before Lister could say anything. “I love it.” _Because it is exactly like you, you goit_.

            Rimmer flailed in surprise as he found himself suddenly accosted by who even knew how many pounds of tear-stained Scouser, the man’s arms wrapped around Rimmer’s shoulders and squeezing tight. Rimmer choked, but couldn’t bring himself to ruin the moment by begging for air. It was over all too soon, anyway, Lister suddenly pulling back, grinning to beat the band. “Sorry, man. I know you don’t go in for all that touchy-feely smeg.”

            “No,” Rimmer agreed, clearing his throat quietly and putting a bit more distance between them for appearance sake, “Absolutely not.”

            “Ya know, I’ve shown that film to a couple of my mates and a few of me best girls. Nobody ever liked it, before.”

            _Then they weren’t paying attention,_ Rimmer thought, wondering how anyone could possibly miss how much pure _Lister_ was there on display between and within each frame of black-and-white Americana.

            In Rimmer’s first few weeks of university, Dr. Marco had addressed his class with a speech. “Art says much about what the artist chooses it to say. It says much about the artist, as well. This is obvious. This, you realize, because you are artists. You give the art, true, but you take the art in, as well. You can tell much about an artist by their art, but you can tell even more about an artist by what the art of other’s brings out in them.” Lister loved _It’s a Wonderful Life_. He didn’t enjoy it the way that Shelby enjoyed Martian television dramas, or the way that Rimmer rather liked documentaries about Napoleon. He _loved_ it. It touched him deep down in his heart, and brought something secret up to the surface, there for the entire world to see. If anyone in Lister’s life had watched the film with him and failed to enjoy it that was due entirely to the fact that their attention had been on the movie when it should have been on the man watching it next to them. The night previous, Rimmer had gathered up his courage and revealed an important, delicate part of his soul to Lister as he explained his motivations for coming to Earth. Now, in this moment, Rimmer realized that Lister had, intentionally or not, returned the favor in kind. The warm feeling in his chest was pleasant, if rather smothering. He took a breath, in case the air should start disappearing or form itself into a solid mass. Neither of those things happened. He breathed in and out, easy as you please.

            “Did you mention food, before?” Rimmer questioned, so shaken by all of this confusing rush of feelings and self-revelation that it seemed prudent to distract the other man with the promise of a curry.

            “Yeah, you up to it? You still look a bit off.”

            Rimmer eased himself off the couch, doing his best not to wince at all of the various bodily aches the motion brought about. “I’m dandy. Peachy. Starving, though. I think that popcorn actually made more space in my stomach, not less. Let’s go.”

            Lister nodded and walked alongside Rimmer and out into the snow-blanketed world. Now that it wasn’t falling in thick, gooey clumps and slowly burying him alive, it was quite safe to travel over and around. The snow was still ugly as smeg, though. Rimmer closed his eyes a moment and allowed himself a few seconds to remember the perfectly clear skies and deep emerald lawns of Io’s self-sustaining, dome-encased communities.

            “D’you ever get homesick?” Lister asked suddenly, causing Rimmer to startle and wonder if he actually did have some low-level extra-sensory abilities, after all. Was he broadcasting his thoughts? But, no. More likely, his thoughts were written obviously all over his dumb face.

            “Sometimes,” Rimmer admitted, following along behind Lister and putting his feet where the other man stepped, thereby lessening his chance of falling into the snow in a weak spot. “But not in the usual way.”

            “Eh?”

            “I don’t miss home, obviously. But I miss Io.”

            Lister looked over his shoulder at the other man, clearly completely lost.

            Rimmer shrugged, unable to explain it any better, in part because he lacked the words to do so and in part because dredging up the feelings involved was too personal and would take far too much time. “I don’t regret coming to Earth,” he said, instead, and basked in Lister’s answering smile.


	9. Chapter 9

The dining hall was sparsely occupied with students who had chosen to stay behind during the holidays. The dozen or so students waiting in line for the kitchens to open up were a strange mishmash. Rimmer vaguely recognized some of the better students from the class he often taught for Dr. Marco. Lister seemed to know a few of the rougher, hungover folks by name. Others were mysteries to them both, some offering a muted greeting and others studiously ignoring the fact that there were other students in the hall with them at all.

            Rimmer shuffled with a few others towards the rather limp-looking salad bar while Lister made his usual beeline toward the small Indian food cubby across the way. When the two emerged with food, Lister suddenly raised his hand high and shouted out to a young woman sitting by herself on the far side of the cafeteria. She was nibbling at a bowl of cottage cheese with pineapple bits, her attention fixated on a book in her hands. She looked up at Lister’s hail and raised her own hand, offering a pretty smile. She was a small, pixie-faced woman with dark brunette hair piled high on her head in a sleek coiff. Her accent was almost as lilting as Lister’s own, her eyes glinting with constant mischief.

            “Hello, Dave,” she greeted as Lister approached with Rimmer at his heels, “Who’s your friend?”

            “Hey, Kriss. This is me roommate, Arnold. Arn, this is Kristine Kochanski. She’s that friend of Twix’s I mentioned. She’s gonna be lookin’ after the Cat. How is he doing, Krissy?” Lister sat down next to Kristine. After a moment of hesitation, Arnold joined them.

            Kriss hummed thoughtfully and laid down her book, dog earring the corner to mark her place. Rimmer winced. He hated it when people did that. Find a scrap of paper, for smeg’s sake. Or, better yet, use a proper bookmark. Rimmer had a whole drawer full of pristine, laminated page markers.

            “He’s a happy little puss, I think. He mostly sleeps constantly and breaks for food and the enthusiastic courting of one of my bunny slippers.”

            “Oh, smeg. Sorry, Kriss,” Lister said, with a friendly grimace.

            Kriss waved him off, “Don’t be. I’ve missed my Mr. Mittens back home. It’s nice to have a kitty to spoil, again.” She smiled. Rimmer almost swallowed his tongue in addition to the bit of carefully crafted lettuce and tomato on his fork. He knew a smile like that. A pinball smile that lit up the room. On some bizarre instinct that he couldn’t quite place, Rimmer glanced over at Lister to gauge his reaction to this luminescent grin. He bit back a groan. Lister’s own hundred-watt smile was in play, brilliant and warm.

            It was like watching a nature documentary. Rimmer half expected they’d lunge at each other like horny hyenas at any moment. He pushed his plate away, suddenly lacking in appetite. Kriss and Lister, lost in flirtation, did not notice. Rimmer swallowed and wondered, miserably, what to do with the pressure blisters forming on his once rumbaing heart. “You know,” he squeaked out as Kristine giggled appreciatively at some unknown quip of Lister’s, “I think I’ll be going on. I’ve got work to do.”

            “Work?” Lister questioned, tearing his eyes away from Krissy’s sparkling eyes, “What work? It’s a holiday, Rimmer. Relax.”

            “I’ve got some personal projects, that’s all,” Arnold argued. “I’ll see you later.”

            Lister gave in rather more easily than he might have in different circumstances. He shrugged. “All right, man. But try to get back before it starts snowin’, this time, okay?” And then he turned his full focus back to Kristine to ask her something else about Cat.

            Rimmer tugged absently at his cuffs and tried to make as dignified an exit as possible. He beat a hasty retreat, swallowing back a growing pressure behind his eyes and in his throat. He refused to break down in tears over something utterly ridiculous. Rimmer hadn’t cried in years, and he wasn’t about to start now, not over David Smegging Lister. It had to be the residual effects of his disastrous evening in the snow. Maybe he was in the beginning stages of air sickness. Maybe he was heartbroken. Life was so unfair. It wasn’t _remotely_ wonderful.

            Kryten the mechanoid was determinedly polishing the windows in the studio classroom when Rimmer arrived. Ignoring him, Arnold made his way to his locker and pulled out his supplies, his gestures methodical and efficient.

            “Good afternoon, Mr. Rimmer, sir!” Kryten greeted, brightly. Apparently Rimmer’s assurances had finally worked their way into the droid’s circuits. They were back on even ground, again, with the cleaning robot about as emotionally stable as he was capable of being. Rimmer offered up a curt greeting in reply, not keen on causing the machine any offense for fear of what the catastrophic result might be for his precious project.

            The accidental line did not look any better in the daylight than it had the night before. If anything, the dark smudge that remained even after his frantic erasing was an especial affront to Rimmer’s sensibilities. Deciding to make the best of it, Rimmer blocked in a new shape in the background, using the smudge as a supporting line. Under his careful penciling, the smudge expanded out into a cylindrical shape that, with a few more lines and a bit of shading, took on the obvious silhouette of a castle nestled in the distant mountains. Making the best of a bad thing was a trait that Rimmer had tried to cultivate in himself for many years. More often than not, he completely failed, except it when it came to his art. With creation, there was no choice but to make the best of mistakes and turn all obstacles into opportunities. Life was not so easily molded.

            Kryten was in and out of the studio for the next several hours. Around teatime, the robot returned, a full tea tray in hand. Arnold felt slightly warmer to Kryten than he had before. It was hard to be upset at anyone--truly human or not--offering jelly-filled biscuits and real, proper tea. Rimmer thanked the droid for his thoughtfulness and nibbled on a pastry with one hand while shading in the darker shadows of the dragon’s fierce expression with the other. When Kryten returned and inquired, with undisguised curiosity, about Rimmer’s roommate dilemma, Rimmer felt there was no harm in all in informing him, reassuringly, that all was quite well again, thank you for asking. Somehow, with the appearance of more cookies and extra cream for his tea, those assurances melted into an honest confession that, perhaps, things between him and Lister weren’t one-hundred percent marvelous, actually.

            Rimmer continued to draw and Kryten continued to clean as the two conversed.

            “But if you have feelings for Mr. Lister, sir, why don’t you tell him so? That’s what Kevin did when Patricia started showing affection for Ricardo on _Andriods_. Kevin’s feelings of jealousy made him realize the depth of his affection, and he was quick to express himself before anything could develop.”

            Rimmer tried not to roll his eyes at having his life compared to that god awful soap opera. “It’s never that easy, in real life. Lister could react badly, once told. It might ruin our friendship.”

            “While I can’t say from personal experience, Mr. Rimmer, sir, I have watched humans in action for a long time, now, and I can say with certainty a few things about their behaviors. I hope you don’t feel I am overstepping my programming when I say, sir, that I’ve seen dishonesty ruin many more friendships than truth. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, there’s a plugged urinal on level 2.”

            Rimmer watched Kryten waddle out with a pensive, uncertain expression. Then he turned his focus back to the less complicated task of bringing mountains and ferocious dragons to life. Eventually, the teapot ran out and all of the biscuits were reduced to crumbs. Rimmer sat back in his chair and yawned hugely, stretching. The piece was nearly done, and he was tempted to push through a few more hours to finish it off. He glanced at clock on the wall and found it much later than he’d realized. No wonder the tea had been allowed to run out; Kryten was probably in power down mode by that time.

            “I should power down, too,” Rimmer mumbled to himself, suddenly aware of how utterly knackered he was. He gathered up his things and put them away as tidily as ever before zipping himself up warmly in his windbreaker and making a quick scuttle toward the dorms. It was not snowing, and most of the previous day’s sludge had even melted away, but Rimmer still didn’t want to take any chances.

            Lister looked up as the door opened and Rimmer slunk in, looking chilled and tired. Arnold glanced around suspiciously. He’d rather expected that he’d find Kristine Kochanski occupying his bunk, or, worse, Lister’s.

            “Have a good day?” Rimmer offered, because it seemed the polite and rational thing to do.

            “Mm, yeah,” Lister said, turning his gaze back to the small gear-operated robot on his worktable—it sat upside down next to the tiny pink-and-yellow sweater Lister was knitting for the Cat. Rimmer had watched Lister build the robot from scratch and scraps over the last several days. It was a bit lopsided, but the mechanics within were well placed. Even only half constructed, the machine could zip across a flat surface with ease once wound. Rimmer had a sneaking suspicion that, one complete, the robot would be utilized to shuttle Lister’s possessions back and forth about the room, allowing the man to remain, stationary and slobbing it, in his bunk. Well, they did say that necessity was the mother of invention. Laziness had to play some part in that process, too, surely.

            Rimmer blinked a bit, unsteady. Lister rarely used one word when ten would do. Even when he was focused and working on something, the man liked to natter on about whatever was going on in his head. Barring that, he hummed. Constantly. Rimmer found it calming. Scouser git whitenoise. The lack was strange.

            Uncertain and baffled, Arnold peeled off his outwear and hung his jacket up, moving to fill the electric kettled. Kryten’s tea had given him a hankering for more. It was cold enough out to warrant the drinking of what little tea he had left. He sighed a bit as the bag steeped, mulling over the prospect of going without decent-tasting tea once the batch was gone. His thoughts meandered aimlessly from there, wondering after Shelby and her holiday and whether or not he should have put some effort into decorating their room for the occasion. The starscape on their ceiling was coming along nicely, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional tree and fairy lights. Rimmer eased himself down at his own workspace, toying with a few colored pencils as he mused.

            He was so lost in these musings that Lister’s sudden clearing of his throat made him startle a bit, tea sloshing in his cup. He glanced over at Lister, who was staring at him with a familiar expression. The man had something on his mind and was about to let the thought out into the wild. Still, he exhibited an unheard of level of hesitation.

            “What is it?” Rimmer prodded, bracing himself instinctively for the worst.

            That was all the prompting Lister needed. The Scouser leaned back in his chair and put the small screwdriver in his hand up to his ear, using the sonic setting to idly clear out some wax build up. Rimmer valiantly managed to put that issue aside, for the moment. “Ye don’t like Krissy much, do you?”

            Arnold had not expected this. He made an affronted, choked, noise, crossing his arms over his chest. “Well that’s nonsense. I barely even know the woman, how could I not like her?”

            “I dunno,” Lister admitted, pulling the screwdriver from his ear canal and rubbing the end of it on his trousers before going back at it again, “But earlier today, you were lookin’ at her with the same face you gave the Barley twins when they made fun of your ears. So, the way I figure it, you must have something against Kochanski, as well. What happened? Did she say something about yer chin?”

            “What’s wrong with my chin?” Rimmer demanded, touching his fingers to his chin and peering self-consciously at his face in the standing shaving mirror at his desk. Used primarily for the purpose of getting a different angle on his work, the mirror was old and permanently spotted and not much help at all in making Rimmer feel better about his face.

            “Rimmer,” Lister said, with clearly exaggerated patience. He knew the other man was stalling.

            Arn sighed, giving the swollen skin around the scar on his forehead an experimental poke. The ‘h’-like shape was starting to look rather infected, and he made a mental note to tend to it with some antiseptic later on. “I’ve got nothing against Kochanski,” he said, dully, not daring to look over at his friend. Rimmer knew his face would betray him. His lips were pulled into a tight half smile, the smile of a lying Arnold.

            “You’re sure? ‘Cos, the thing is, me and her hit it off pretty fair, today. An’ I think I might be keen to see more of her.”

            “So?” Arnold questioned, stiffly. He sniffed and pulled a blank piece of scrap paper towards him, plucking up a blue colored pencil and beginning to block out some light, sketchy shapes. The more lines he made, the more the tight knot in his stomach eased bit by bit. “What would it matter if I didn’t like her, then? Not that I don’t. Because I do.”

            Lister sighed, exasperated. “’Cos you’re my best mate, you prig, and it’s important to me tha’ you feel comfortable around me and the people I like. And if you don’t like Kris, I wouldn’t want to pursue it and make you miserable. It’s like the Cat all over again. Why don’t you understand?”

            Arnold pulled a black pencil from the lot and made a few heavy, curved lines around the light blue sketch. He swallowed thickly, feeling rather like there was something prickly and unpleasant jammed in between his tonsils. “I’m your best mate?” he questioned, voice higher than he would have liked.

            “Yeah, guy, of course,” Lister replied, voice soft and gentle, as if he expected Rimmer might startle like a wild animal otherwise.

            Rimmer brought two of the heavy curving lines together with a softer, straighter set. The lines outlined the shape of an eye, and then two. “Oh,” he squeaked, and then spent a few seconds trying to unobtrusively clear the tightness in his throat. “That’s nice of you,” he said, as if Lister had complimented his shoes. He drew a few quick, sure lines away from the eyes, creating a slight crinkle of laughter at the corners. A swipe or two of his pencil formed high-arching brows and then from there a wide nose and a full bottom lip with corners of the mouth pulled up in a cocky, half-mocking smile.

            “Nice has nothin’ to do with it, Arn,” Lister said, less cautious, now. “You’re a good man, and I like spendin’ time with you. Nobody I know’s ever listened to me natter on about things like you do. And you sat all through _It’s a Wonderful Life_ and never said a word against it, almost, even though I know you hated every second. And you put up with the Cat for all that time, even though your face was being made mincemeat. And you’ve gotten chummy with my other mates, even though they’re rude to ya, sometimes, and not your type of people at all. You even let me break the rules, sometimes, ‘long as it isn’t important. And I’d’ve got expelled from this place and made to go who knows where excepting for you. And you’re a laugh, you know, even though you don’t always mean to be. You’re an uptight, weasel-faced, sycophantic, cowardly little smeghead, an’ I love you for it, you dumb, jealous git.”

            Arnold’s pencil went still. “You do, of course, mean that in the usual uber platonic, manly, chummy, extremely heteronormative, ‘I love you like a brother’ kind of way, don’t you?” he questioned, all in a rush. His gaze flickered over to Lister and then back again before he could even register the other man’s expression. He had a feeling that the expression in question was an awful lot like the face staring back at him from the page under his pencil. Colored pencil only barely did Lister justice, but that bright gaze was knowing, and the smile, for all it was only a smirk, was fond.

            “You gonna do a runner if I say it’s not?”

            Rimmer considered this quite seriously, plucking the brown pencil up and turning it a bit on its side to lightly shade in the darkest hues of Lister’s skin onto the page. “Maybe,” he admitted, his voice surprisingly calm and hands remarkably steady. He listened attentively as Lister shifted in his seat and stood, moving across the room and around the back of Rimmer’s chair. Lister’s hands were warm, the weight of his body providing an odd comfort. Arnold felt tingly and light, and Lister’s palms seemed to be the only thing keeping him from floating up to their night black ceiling.

            “It looks like me,” Lister complimented the unfinished work. He leaned forward for a better look and his braids dropped forward, brushing Rimmer’s damned weak chin. Rimmer sat rigidly, having no idea whatsoever of what to do with all of the extra limbs he suddenly felt he possessed. What was happening? “You do that so easily. Capture what’s around, I mean. Stuff like this, so precise s’like a photosnap. And you do it with your voice, too. I’ve heard you do it lots of times, mimicking the Cat and Shelby, and Dr. Marco, and even me, the once. An’ it’s exactly right.” Lister sounded breathy and awed, and he was speaking inches from Rimmer’s ear. Rimmer’s heart had skipped right over the rumba and had thrown itself into a frantic bout of Jazzercise. He let go of the pencil in his hand and rubbed his sweaty palms on his knees. Lister continued to hold to his shoulders, leaning close.

            “Uhm. List-Lister? You’re in my light, old chum,” Arnold said, throwing an Ace phrase at the man in the hopes of reminding him of their hearty, friendly, status. Unfortunately, it all came out in a breathy sigh, ruining the effect.

            “Am I?” Lister tilted his head and his body just so, his head resting close to Rimmer’s own, his chin a sharp point of contact on the other man’s shoulder. Lister, well, _nuzzled_ against Rimmer’s neck, his lips brushing, barely there, against his skin. “Is that better?” he murmured, low.

            A strangled whimper tore itself from Arnold’s throat. The worst part was that, actually, the shift had, in fact, restored all of the necessary light to the neglected drawing. “Uh, yes. Thank you.”

            “No problem,” Lister huffed, amused. His lips were harder to dismiss the second time ‘round. Especially when they started nibbling. Rimmer’s hands opened and closed in a tight clench against his knees, his back ramrod straight. He stared ahead at the wall, unseeing. He realized in a distant, uncaring way that his mouth was agape and he was breathing in soft, needy pants. The racing, frantic rhythm of his heart was nothing compared to the growing interest in his trousers. This was, by far, the most amorous attention Rimmer had ever experienced in his life. Not for lack of trying, of course. Girls back on Io had never seemed to have time for him. Too many of the local girls knew his brothers, and, comparing them to Arnold’s scrawny, awkward, sensitive self, found him wanting. Once he’d left the planet, he’d hoped for success, but he’d found himself more interested in pursuing his work than chasing after his fellow students. The older he’d gotten and the more responsibility he’d had placed in his lap, the more he found himself simply too bothered to consider it. Romance was a complicated, involved process, as far as he was aware. He couldn’t measure up. So, excepting the odd stolen moment, his sex life could, without question, be labeled as about as existent as Big Foot and as active as a geriatric space sloth.

            “I’m not gay, you know,” Rimmer offered, because he felt that was the expected thing.

            “No?” Lister hummed, moving to nibble on Rimmer’s earlobe, instead. Dimly Arnold wondered if the man was trying to seduce him or eat him, and found that either way he wasn’t sure it mattered to his cock. Then, all of the sudden, the nibbling ceased. “Do you want me to stop?” Lister questioned, and Rimmer had never heard him so serious, before. He was convinced that if he said ‘stop,’ Lister would, no questions asked. The realization made him relax considerably.

            “If you do, I’ll kill you,” Rimmer groaned, his head falling back. Oh, what the smeg. He was so far past wanting to prevent the inevitable, especially when what was coming about promised to be so exceptionally good. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

            “Why didn’ you?” Lister challenged. His hands slid down from Rimmer’s shoulders, slipping down, flat-palmed, against his chest. The warmth of the backwards embrace was nice. The friction of the motion was even nicer.

            “Honestly, I didn’t realize it until this morning.”

            Lister laughed against him, his shoulders shaking with it. Finally, he pulled back a bit, gasping for air, his eyes tearful. He rubbed them on Rimmer’s shirt, and Rimmer didn’t even care. “God, Arn, I thought you were smart.”

            “I am! It just didn’t seem possible. I’m not dreaming, am I? Maybe I’m asleep. No, of course. I can’t possibly be asleep. You’re not snoring. Ow, hey!”

            Lister had pinched him.

            “Rimmer,” he breathed against the back of Rimmer’s neck, squeezing his arms around the other man’s shoulders gently, “not for nothin’, and I’m willing to give it a go if you are, but I think this would all be a lot more smeggin’ pleasant without the chair in the way.”

            Arnold thought that was likely the best suggestion he’d heard in a long time.


	10. Chapter 10

Rimmer had no real memory of Christmas mornings, but there were plenty of Christmas Eve socials to recall. Mummy had never missed a chance to show off, and attending a giant holiday bash was the best way to do it. Mummy, Father, and his brothers would attend, at least. Rimmer stayed at home. He never quite managed to earn the opportunity to go. Had he been a little more up on his classic fairytales and a little less intent on the battle tactics of Julius Cesar, there is a chance he might have found some solace in the story of Cinderella, a young child condemned to a fate similar to his own. Instead, young Rimmer, ordered to not stray out of his room on pain of verbal lashing, carefully sharped his single graphite pencil and pulled images up from the pages of his oldest, most smeggy, books.

            Mummy did not allow him near blank pages. There were no crayons or paintbrushes in their home. If there was anything his mother hated, it was the arts. She would extend, perhaps, some appreciation for a canvas work, but only if it were priced inordinately high and hanging over the mantel of one of the more influential families as a conversation piece. There was no time for actors, painters, or musicians in the Rimmer household. This was unfortunate, to say the least, as that was all Rimmer had ever wanted to be. It was his deepest, most secret wish, buried deeper and deeper each passing year as his father’s Space Corps fervor fell more heavily upon his shoulders.

            Christmas Eve meant a grand party for everyone but Arnie. Christmas morning meant gifts, but only for little boys who had earned them with high marks and aptitudes. Arnold learned, over the years, to treat Christmas as if it were just another smegging day, and he’d fallen into the habit of assuming that everyone else felt the same.

            Lister loved Christmas. He loved it nearly as much as he loved _It’s a Wonderful Life_. This became especially apparent on Christmas Eve morning, when Rimmer reached sleepily for his newest Lister pillow and grasped onto Lister’s pillow, instead. Arnold opened one eye and made a low whine. Lister never, ever woke up before Rimmer. Granted, Arnold often proceeded him by only a quarter hour or so on those lazy holiday mornings, but he was still always the first to wake and stagger out of bed. “Dave?” Rimmer croaked, yawning widely and throwing his long legs over the edge of the bed. He rubbed the grit from his eyes and wondered at the possibility of lying back down and getting a few more hours in.

            His thoughts scattered as the dorm room door burst open with a bang. Rimmer jumped to his feet, on his way to grab up his chair as a shield from this intruder. The intruder turned out to be Lister, and he laughed at Rimmer’s alarm. “S’just me!” he chirped, lifting up his overloaded hands to show off the colorful bags held in each. “Happy Christmas!”

            Arnold relaxed his defensive stance and rubbed his hands through his hair, causing all the curls to stand up in odd directions. Typically, he would have felt self-conscious about that, but Lister had recently proved to be exceptionally fond of keeping Rimmer’s hair good and tousled. “What’s all of that?” he asked, because he could tell Lister was dying to answer.

            “Decorations!” Lister whooped, and started to pull items out of the bags one by one. Rimmer looked on in exasperation as their small dorm room slowly acquired piles of sparkly tinsel, blown-glass ball ornaments, glitter-infused velvet wall hangings with depictions of Santa and his lot, and more.

            “Dare I ask where all of this came from?” He picked up a single string of tinsel and wrapped it around and around a finger as tight as he could, watching with idle fascination as the skin caught in the wrapping went red and white all over, just like a peppermint stick.

            “Just around,” Lister replied, setting off a million alarm bells in Rimmer’s head.

            “Listy, please tell me you didn’t steal all of this smeg.”

            “S’not smeg,” he argued, placing a giant red ribbon on Arnold’s head. “An’, no, thank you very much, I did not steal it. I went ‘round all the dorms with people in ‘em and asked for whatever extra bits they’d give me. Everyone was extra generous. ‘Tis the season and that.”

            Rimmer surveyed their impressive hoard of Christmas splendor and wrinkled his nose in disgust, “This is going to cause such a mess.”

            “We’ll clean it up afterwards.”

            “We don’t have room for all of this.”

            “We can push me work table on the other wall an’ close the closet doors up.”

            “It’s tacky and weird.”          

            “It’s festive an’ pretty.”

            “I hate Christmas.”

            “That’s ‘cos you’ve not done it properly.” Lister had, in the midst of this exchange, gotten quite close. “Besides, I thought you’d be excited,” he murmured, grinning.

            “Excited?” Rimmer replied, swallowing thickly in the force of that nearly-pinball grin. “Why would I be excited?”

            “’Cos. I haven’t given you your present, yet, have I?”

            “You don’t have to. I told you, that jacket is just as much for my sake as yours. The other one was just so filthy, and I knew you wouldn’t wear anything unless it was leather and-.”

            In hindsight, the kiss probably shouldn’t have come as such a shock. Lister pulled back and Rimmer was left, leaning forward slightly on his toes and running his tongue absently over his lips. “Uhm,” he faltered, “What was I saying, again?”

            “You were sayin’ ‘Oh, Dave, ye got me a present! How thoughtful, ta!’”

            Rimmer snorted and mimicked the sentence back, complete with a pitch-perfect parroting of Lister’s Liverpudlian accent. “All right, then. What’d you get me?”

            Lister stepped back and retrieved the last bag from his workstation. “Sorry it isn’t wrapped up. I tried, but it just kept falling out of the paper, and I was afraid it’d get lost.” Lister held out a fist. After staring at it a moment, baffled, Rimmer cupped his palms and held them under. Lister uncurled his fingers, and something small, dense, and metal plopped into Rimmer’s hands. He picked the item up between two fingers and frowned at it in confusion. The device was a metal piece about the size of a lipstick tube with a cup-shaped, oval bit of flexible plastic attached. Rimmer turned it around and around, looking for an ‘on’ switch or just a clue.

            “I don’t know what this is,” he admitted.

Lister smiled indulgently, “Thought you mightn’t. It’s not a thing you see on Io much, I’d bet, but they’re really common down here. Put the plastic bit up to your mouth, like. Yeah, there you go. Is it snug? Brutal. Okay, now breathe in.”

            Rimmer had lived on Earth for so long that he rarely noticed the smog, anymore. When he’d first arrived on the pollution-rich planet, he’d found the once simple act of breathing to be a chore and done all that he could to stay indoors where automated air filters cleared out the worst of it and made it more tolerable. Even then, the air flowing about in the buildings on campus had a stale, chemical edge. Despite having adapted to it long ago, Rimmer would still sometimes pause mid-breath to scrape his teeth against his tongue, trying to rid himself of the clinging metallic taste. Now, as Rimmer took in a deep breath through the device as bidden, he could taste no odd tang in the air. There was no need to carefully modulate his breath to accommodate for odd odors or a strange, sticky texture. The air was as clear and pure as back on Io, and for the first time in years, Rimmer felt a weight lift away from his chest, and his lungs dared to truly expand.

            “It’s only got a six month warranty,” Lister said, watching him closely for his reaction, “But I figure that works out about right. I can get ya a new one on your birthday. Assumin’ you like it, I mean. Do you like it?”

            Rimmer, greedy, took another breath through the portable filter before lowering his hand. “You got me an air filter?” he questioned, his bafflement evident.

            Lister’s grin fell only a little before rallying again. “I know it seems kinda silly, but I was thinkin’ about what you told me a few days back, and about how scary it’s gotta be, never knowin’ when you might not be able to breathe anymore. And I figured that maybe if you had somethin’ to get rid of the smoke and whatnot that it’d make it easier to calm down.”

            Arnold blinked and looked down at the filter in his palm and then back to Lister, marveling a bit. The idea was really quite genius. Rimmer’s asthma attacks were all in his head, but the effects were all too real. It _would_ provide him with some security and a sense of calm to access clean, healthy air in the midst of a fit. It was just a token, of course, and nothing close to a cure for what ailed him, but the potential to control his symptoms was there. Arnold reached out to the uncertain Scouser before him and pulled him in for a one-armed hug and a deep, heated kiss. “I like it,” he assured, “I definitely, certainly, absolutely like it.”

            Lister looked relieved, “Good, ‘cos I didn’t have a clue what else to get ya.”

            Rimmer rolled his eyes and pulled back, going to find a safe perch to put the filter for a moment before turning his attention to the mess on Lister’s desk. “It’s like the spirit of smegging Christmas vomited all over this entire corner,” he murmured, picking up several of the ornaments. He turned to Lister, who was look at him with rapt attention. “Well, Listy. I think we’re going to need to find ourselves a tree. Any ideas?”

            Lister’s pin-ball smile lit up the room with more warm, festive glow than a thousand strings of fairy lights.


	11. Chapter 11

Kryten caught him coming in and immediately initiated smug mode. “Good morning, Mr. Rimmer. You seem cheerful this morning!” And then he’d managed a bizarre parody of a wink and offered Arnold some chocolate digestives and tea. Munching happily on the biscuits and placing a fresh, blank page on his easel, Arnold made a mental note to introduce Lister to the droid, sometime. He had a sneaking feeling the two would hit it off. They both had a similarly horrible grasp of subtlety.

            Rimmer hummed quietly while he worked. He rarely ever hummed. Mummy had hated that particular habit. She couldn’t abide musicians, except in the context of the hymns taught to all young Hoppists in church. It was one of those old, ancient hymns Rimmer hummed now. He couldn’t remember the words at all, except the vague impression that the general theme had been about the beauty of nature. Suns and fishes, ladedah.

            Lister had been completely dead to the world when Rimmer had stirred early that morning. He’d nearly stayed where he was, anyway, thinking that it was likely rude to wiggle out from under a bloke and disappear after spending yet another night together—eight nights and counting. His tune had changed four hours on, however, when it was nearly lunch time and Lister was still snoring away.

            Rimmer had left a note telling the man where he’d gone off to—signed with a heart, for smeg’s sake. Shelby was going to scream tonight when he finally shared the real nature of his and Lister’s relationship with her, hopefully while sober; it had seemed unlucky, somehow, to spill the beans before. Things were good, though. Great, in fact, and even a little bit of possible bad luck couldn’t get in his way. Rimmer made his way to Rugger’s for a few hours of peaceful sketching. Now, he put pencil to paper and pulled images forth like a magician conjuring a rabbit from a hat. Under his mindful hand, figures began to take shape across the wide page, like a family posing for a portrait. All but one of the faces were familiar to him, and easily crafted from memory. The other took some imagination, but the process went far more smoothly than he would have anticipated, as if the face was one he’d seen, once, even if not in this lifetime. Rimmer’s tongue poked between his teeth as he carefully shaded shadows in and around Lister’s eyes. He looked older, like that, more rugged and put upon. Somehow, that weariness suited him. It was the face of a wanderer, an adventurer.

            Kryten’s boxy dildo of a head was a joy to articulate on the page, all lines and planes that somehow came together form an expressive, friendly face. He was almost exactly the droid as he was now, Rimmer decided, except perhaps a touch more neurotic. Loving Lister would do that to anyone, even a machine.

            His own shape came together quickly. He looked a little older and paunchier, too, though he knew he wouldn’t actually look much changed, no matter how much time happened to pass. Holograms weren’t supposed to age like living people. He put extra time into crafting the branding ‘H’, giving it a metallic shine. The uniform his hologrammatic self wore was green, like his favorite windbreaker, and ridiculously militaristic. He’d never have worn anything like it, in reality, but it seemed to fit the smirking, smug git forming in his mind’s eye.

            The Cat was the tricky one, but somehow the sleek, perfectly coiffed man in the flashy suit fit Lister’s demon kitty monster to a ‘t.’ Rimmer spent an extra-long time on the creature’s visible fangs, working them to a shiny, dangerous point. “Yoooow, buddy! I’m looking good! What am I saying, I always look good, yoww!” Rimmer laughed softly, playing with the high-pitched, feline wail as he sketched.

            On an impulse, as Rimmer blocked in the cockpit of a scrummy spaceship around the figures, he scribbled a man’s face on one of the many screens. The man was bald and had a bland, unassuming expression, his front teeth vaguely bucked and prominent. Rimmer frowned, feeling that wasn’t quite right. To ease the itchy-feeling uncertainty, he sketched in an identical screen on the opposite side of Lister’s head and drew in a woman’s head, instead. She sported a nearly identically bland expression and chin-length, white-blonde hair. “What’s happening, dudes?” Rimmer pitched in a nasal, casual drawl, trying out the phrase in both a male and higher, female register. “Holly and Holly,” he muttered, pleased with the idea. Near the floating heads, in his tiny, neat, copperplate writing, he wrote “IQ of 6,000.” For some reason, that seemed like the world’s biggest joke. Rimmer laughed, and he finished off Kryten’s biscuits and the piece within a few hours. It was silly, something out of a Space Corps comedy show, but it struck a chord in him, all the same. Lister would like it.

            He carefully rolled up the paper and put away his things, thanking the droid for the tea on his way out. As he trooped back toward the dorm, excited to show Lister his funny drawing, he hummed the old hymnal again, and found some of the lyrics drifting back to memory.

            _Goldfish shoals nibble at my toes/fun, fun, fun/in the sun, sun, sun._


End file.
